


The Blood of the Covenant

by saintsrow2



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: AU, Angst, Ghost Eddie Kaspbrak, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Multi, Sequel, THEIR KIDS ARE THE MAIN CHARACTERS, THEY STILL APPEAR BUT THEY'RE NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS, YES ALL THE LOSERS ARE DEAD IN THIS
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:15:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23452318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: In 1989, seven kids came together to defeat Pennywise.In 2016, those seven kids returned to do it again.In 2043, Pennywise has returned, but none of the Losers made it another twenty-seven years. The task falls to the only people it can: their children.An AU where the Losers didn't kill Pennywise forever, they lost their memories when they left Derry again, and their adult kids have to come finish the job. A story about finding out who your parents really were, healing, and intergenerational trauma.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 38
Kudos: 133





	1. Five Phone Calls

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally intended to be a one-shot, but it got really, really long. I'm hoping posting the first part will kick my ass into gear and make me finish the next bit. 
> 
> Some notes: This AU is heavy. The Losers all died, following Beverly's prediction none of them would make it another 27 years. They'll appear in flashbacks and other places, but no one is going to come back to life. It's a fic about their kids and the kids' relationships with their parents. 
> 
> Joey Kaspbrak was originally created for this fic, this fic is not canon in Turtle Creek and Turtle Creek isn't canon in this fic, I just reused my OC in that AU.
> 
> This is also a horror AU. It has disturbing and frightening scenes. There will be moderate threats of violence, some blood, but nothing graphic. Suicide and death will be talked about but not portrayed. 
> 
> This fic takes place in 2043 and there'll be a few references to future technology and so forth, but it's not going to dwell on anything. I don't want to worldbuild that much. 
> 
> All that said, hopefully I haven't put you off too much.

is thicker than the water of the womb

* * *

Dan's phone ringing wakes him up from a dream about a turtle and the voice of a child he almost recognises, and his first thought is that something is wrong. He assumes he's slept through his alarm and now work is calling, his editor is breathing down the phone wanting to know why her 'favourite' sports reporter didn't bother to roll into the office on time. It's still dark, the summer sun only just beginning to crest over the Atlanta skyline, and the piercing light of Dan's cell phone screen is nearly blinding in the warm dark of his bedroom. By the time his eyes focus enough to read his phone screen, squinting without his glasses, he sees that it is only 6:30 AM, and more than that, the phone number isn't one he recognises. His phone tells him he is being called by someone in Maine.

 _Either it's a crank call or someone has a really important tip about East Coast football,_ he thinks. He rubs his eyes and answers the call, flopping back down on the pillow with the phone to his ear. 

"Hello?" He says, his voice raspy with sleep. He coughs to clear his throat. 

"Is this Daniel Uris?" A woman he does not know asks.

There's a seriousness to her voice that snaps him out of that last degree of sleep, the idea he might finish this call and roll over to get another hour or so of shut eye vanishing like a dream. Dan has had many awkward, grim conversations with strangers in his line of work, and he is not easily shaken, but something, maybe the strange hour, the distance of the call, or maybe there's just something inside him that senses this is going to be difficult to hear. An instinctual warning sign, a dog howling before the earthquake comes.

"Speaking," Dan says. 

"I'm calling about your father."

Dan's breath catches in his throat. He jerks upright again, swinging his legs around to sit on the edge of the bed, clutching the phone tightly.

"Is this a joke?" He snaps. "This isn't funny. Who is this?"

"My name is Will Hanlon. Your father and my father were friends, growing up."

There's a smoothness to her voice that makes Dan feel like there is a point she is trying to guide them both too, a purpose to her call, but the explanation catches him off-guard. He tries to find something to say when the phone dings with the sound of a text message being received and he looks, seeing a photograph Will has sent. The photograph makes his heart stop.

It's definitely his father. Dan has seen enough photographs to know him, but he also looks a hell of a lot like Dan himself. Stanley Uris is maybe thirteen or fourteen, sitting with his arm around a sweet-faced kid with a soft smile. Behind them another teenager with messy black hair and huge glasses pulls a face at the camera. The photograph has to be over fifty years old. His father looks so happy.

Will says something but Dan doesn't hear it because he's staring at a picture of the father he never met, younger than Dan is now, a photograph he's never seen before. A second later another photo comes through, again of his father, this time scowling at the camera while a girl with red hair laughs uproariously at a joke none of them will ever know, a moment that is captured perfectly here but will never have context. The feeling that Dan brings to it is all his own, and he swallows thickly against the emotion rising in his throat.

"Dan?" Will says.

"Yeah. Yeah, sorry. It's just… I haven't seen a lot of photos of my Dad as a kid. My grandparents only had a couple, and my Mom never knew much about his childhood…" Dan wipes his eyes under his glasses. "Your, uh, your father knows him?"

"He's the other kid in the first photo, the one your father is hugging. His name was Mike Hanlon." 

Was. _Oh,_ Dan thinks. _She wants memories of him, or something. To see if friends have photos, or videos, things like that…_

"I… Don't know if you know this, Will, but my Dad died… Before I was even born, actually, I don't think I…" 

"No, I heard. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry about a lot of things. But I'm calling to ask you if you want to know why he died."

Once again Dan's mood plummets. He thought he was getting a handle on this situation, but now there's only more confusion, and his patience is wearing thin. Dan thinks he's a decent guy, but he also has a strong dislike of _weird shit_ , and his patience for it tends to be limited. He likes to deal with the facts. It's why he's a reporter. Because he doesn't make shit up.

" _Excuse me_?" He says. Dan knows how his father died. He went through that revelation when he was fourteen and his natural inclination to pry into the truth finally got him answers, answers he wasn't sure he had wanted when he heard them, his mother's voice laden with grief. He'd been angry for a while, unable to understand why his father would do something like that. It had taken him a long time to come to terms with the fact that he would never know, no one would ever know. He'd done the same things his mother had when she had found out; trawled through financial records, family friends, emails, phone calls, work documents. There was nothing. No reason why a successful, happily married accountant with a child on the way would suddenly just… 

"Your father was from a town called Derry, in Maine. If you want proof, I have it. He was in a group of other kids. When they were all thirteen they had to do something unimaginable. Twenty-seven years after that, they had to come back. It's been another twenty-seven years now and… My Dad wanted me to be ready for this day. He spent his whole life waiting to bring everyone together. Now I have to do the same thing." 

"What are you _talking_ about? What ‘thing’ did they have to do? I really don't appreciate how cryptic you're being."

"If I hit you with this all at once you wouldn't believe me. But I _know_ you know there are things about your father that don't make sense. And I know you want answers."

"This is insane."

"Yeah. It is. But the truth is in Derry. All six of us will be here, on September 8th. Bring the letter, the one your Dad wrote. I know you have it."

A week from today. She’s right, he does have the letter. Or rather, his mother has it, carefully pressed in the back of a photograph album. He can probably borrow it for a couple of days… Wait, when did he decide that he _was_ going to go? It’s like he knew he would without even having to make up his mind.

"Six? Six of who?"

Another photo arrives. Seven kids this time, including Stan and Mike, and the red-haired girl and the boy with glasses. Three others, too. All sitting around a makeshift dam in the woods, dirty and grinning and filled with a freedom and sense of accomplishment that only came with doing something important with the people you love. Dan looks into his father's face and wonders if it's possible to miss someone you never met. 

He does not like weird shit. But he does like answers. 

" _Their_ kids," Will says. "The Losers Club."

Dan doesn't believe in the supernatural. He doesn't believe in fate, or superstition, or magic. He's religious, but it's as much history and metaphor and centuries of argument as it is belief, to him. He doesn't keep lucky charms. That kind of superstitious thinking is rife in sports, and he's always thought it was absurd. For the first time in his life he is aware of a feeling in his gut -- no, deeper than that. A feeling right down in his core, in the very heart of what Dan considers himself, that he _has_ to go. It's more than journalist's instinct, it's more than the sense of bad news coming you get when you hear someone's tone shift dark. It's like a calling; ancient, inherent, older than Dan could ever understand. He has to go to Derry.

Zara is awake at 6AM sharp, same as always, and she misses the call when it comes through at 8AM because she's in a different phone call with Francis & Mill Attorneys. She's in the car, heading down the highway to a meeting with her client, the same client that Francis & Mill very much want to give them a hell of a lot of money for breaking the terms of her contract. There is a good few million dollars on the line, if Zara can't argue that the contract was bullshit in the first place. It's the kind of thing that could make someone else fall apart from stress, and the exact kind of thing Zara takes in her stride. 

She notices the missed call when she gets to the office, a huge glass building in the middle of LA that has the law office she worked for sitting in the centre floors like a diamond in the centre of a ring; pretty, and strong enough to cut throats. She's wondering who the fuck is calling her from a random cellphone number when it rings again and she hits answer instinctively, figuring her assistant wouldn't have let the call come through if it wasn't important. 

"Zara Ortiz," she said. "Who's calling?"

She stays in her car, watching a few of the other lawyers walk past her into the building. The vast windows reflect back the white clouds in the blue sky, dark and warped on the tinted glass. Her eyes focus on what looks like the shape of a turtle passing over the side of the building and she becomes aware of a cold feeling rolling down her spine. Her eyes snap back to the sky, but she cannot trace the pattern of the turtle above her. 

She takes the call in the car; for no real reason she can discern, she doesn't want to be overheard. There's something strange about the call, and she doesn't even really know why she's indulging in it. If it ends up being a waste of time or, God forbid, another fucking journalist, she's going to be annoyed at herself for even trying. She doesn't need her coworkers to see her arguing with some 'writer' from a celebrity gossip rag.

"My name is Will Hanlon. This is about your father." 

Zara sighs gutterly.

"No, I'm not interested in talking about my father with strangers, thank you." She's about to cancel the call but Will yells for her to wait.

"I'm not a stranger, not really. We may never have met, but our fathers were like brothers."

Zara's phone dings and she sees a picture has arrived; her father aged thirteen, standing on the back of a bike being ridden by a soft-eyed kid the same age. Zara frowns. Her father stares over his shoulder at someone off-camera, his eyes huge behind bottle-bottom glasses, something in them bright. She is not a sentimental person, but it's hard to look at a picture of the father you loved at a time when he looked freer than she'd ever seen. Her memories of their last meeting are raw beneath the surface. It's been five years; some days that feels like an eternity without him there, some days it doesn't feel like anything at all. 

Right then she just misses her Dad. It's that part of her, the woman who loves her father rather than the hard-nosed lawyer, that stops her from hanging up the phone. 

"You know Dad died," Zara says.

"Mine too. Three months back," Will says.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Not as sorry as I am." 

Will laughs once and Zara finds she laughs as well, a well of sympathy opening up inside her for this strange woman who somehow got her number. 

"Truth is, Ms Ortiz, your father was in a group once. In his hometown, in Derry, Maine. Seven of them. And there's six of us kids they had. I'm trying to get all of us together." 

"For a reunion?" Zara says, puzzled.

"There's things your father never told you."

"Oh, I am _well_ aware."

"If you want to know everything, you need to be here on September 8th. There are things happening. A man named Stanley Uris will have written him a letter. Bring it with you."

"You understand what you're saying is absolutely insane."

The _letter_ ? Zara knows the letter. She got it when her father died, in a box of his old things. Opening that box for the first time and seeing it on the top of a bunch of legal documents had shaken her pretty badly. At first she’d almost thought her Dad had written it for _her_ , and had been disturbed by seeing the wrong name at the end, the name of a man she’d never heard of. 

Will laughs again. "Yeah, I know. Dad prepared me my whole life for this, and I still feel like I'm doing it all wrong. But if you and your dad were anything like me and mine, I know you've looked at him and wished you understood him a little more."

Zara went through phases with her father; sometimes she thought she was better off without him, without the stress and the drama, the explosive arguments. But other times there was never anything she wanted other than his approval. And while she knows -- in the way those who understand what it means to be truly loved by someone know -- she always had that, it was the grey areas of her father’s life that always made him so hard to crack. She thinks maybe she knew her dad more than anyone else ever knew him, but his life was a patchwork of grey and missing pieces. She never knew her grandparents, or what her father’s family traditions were. It had always been like Richard Tozier was just one day born onto the stage, microphone in hand, ready to start reeling off jokes -- except that couldn’t possibly be true. No one appears anywhere fully formed. She had just never known the full story. 

Zara thinks of herself as someone who is hard to satisfy. Not that she is unreasonable, but that she has a key understanding of when something can be done just a little bit better. She was never against putting in the hard work to pull off something really great; in fact, she wanted to. She stayed later and worked harder than everyone else, when it was worth it, when her gut told her that there was something here worth pursuing, that could be done a little better if she put in the time. She always knew when something could be improved, trusted her instincts when she felt it wasn’t right. It was what made her such a great lawyer, but it was also why she had never really been all that satisfied with her life. There was always something that needed fixing. Right up until this phone call, she thought it was her kitchen cabinets.

“So, I’m expected to run out in the middle of an incredibly important case to go to Dad’s hometown, which I’ve never heard of, on the word of some strangers I’ve never met, to come and talk to you about his mysterious past?” Zara says.

“Yes,” Will says. “I know stuff about him no one does. I probably know him better than you do.”

“Is that right.”

Her gut was telling her there was more she could do.

Rose’s phone goes off in the middle of a lecture on the work of Robert Rauschenberg and she turns as red as her namesake and mutes it, the chirpy pop song she has set as her ringtone making a couple of the other students chuckle lightly or sigh impatiently. She keeps the phone on silent for the rest of the lecture but it vibrates angrily in her breast pocket intermittently throughout the rest of the lecture. It makes her think of a huge angry hornet hammering against the window, trying to get in. Eventually she gets so annoyed she turns her phone off and resolves not to think about it. If it’s that important they’ll call again when she’s out of class. 

The lecture is two hours and she truly doesn’t think about her phone again; this is the final year of her art history degree and she’s not going to be distracted. When class is over she doesn’t even think about needing to turn her phone back on, having forgotten all about it while she talks to some other students; she walks to the coffee shop on campus with her friend Simone so they can get some brunch and doesn’t even realise her phone is still off until she takes it out to text her girlfriend. She turns it back on and finds that there are five missed calls from a number she doesn’t know and glares at the screen.

“What’s up?” Simone asks through a mouthful of muffin.

“I don’t know, some weird spam thing,” Rose says. She texts Haneul to ask her when she’s going to be home from work and realises the same number texted her. 

_Rose Hanscom-Marsh, I need to talk to you about something important pertaining to your parents. Please call me back as soon as you can._

“What the f…?” She says, outloud, showing the text to Simone. Simone pulls a horrified face.

“That’s weird,” she says. “That’s creepy as hell.”

“It’s probably another cancer charity that wants me to advocate,” Rose says, feeling a little mournful about her own dismissiveness. 

The charities really crawled out of the woodwork when her mother had died, after the horrible shock of those last few months that vanished far too soon. Rose didn’t like to be bitter, but it had felt very cynical how clearly organisations had just wanted her family names on their banner. Simone squeezes her hand and Rose gives a ‘what can you do’ smile, shrugging it off. She’s not going to get into it now; there’s another class in half an hour, she doesn’t want to sit there and have this on her mind the entire time. Best to just let it go.

Rose’s dad taught her how to deal with anxiety; never shut it down or argue with yourself, just accept that you are feeling anxious, that this is what anxiety feels like, and ground yourself. She can almost hear Dad’s voice sometimes when she takes a deep breath and lets the feeling go. _The anxiety isn’t ‘because’, it just is._ She’s good at letting things go.

She doesn’t think about the calls or the text for the next few hours, gets through her class without a problem. She would have forgotten all about it until another text appears when she’s walking out of class at lunchtime. 

_My name is Will Hanlon. Your parents and my father were good friends growing up. His name was Mike Hanlon. He wanted me to reach out to you._

The message gives her the creeps. Neither of her parents had ever mentioned a ‘Mike Hanlon’. They hadn’t really ever talked about growing up at all, but that was just them all over. Private people. 

She copies the number into DuckDuckGo and tries to look it up, but it’s just someone’s cell phone number and doesn’t appear to be connected to anything. It’s probably from Maine. Who the fuck is calling her from _Maine_? The search results for ‘Will Hanlon’ are confused by the fact that there are multiple semi-famous people with the same name, but nothing alarming comes up. It’s too normal a name, and Rose doesn’t know if that makes it more or less suspicious. 

She dawdles over if it’s worth calling them back or not. She’s unsure if it would actually make it better. They might keep hammering her with creepy spam if she gives in, but then again, it might be nothing. Her mother was always jumpy around calls from unknown numbers, but that was because of _that man_ , a guy who died fifteen years ago in the deeply unpleasant circumstances he truly deserved, so unless he’s come back from the grave to hunt down his dead ex-wife’s kid… Unlikely. Rose calls them back, standing on the college green under a tree and watching people stream past. Her eyes focus on a banner one of the students is carrying; the turtle mascot of a local sports team stares back at her with unseeing eyes. The phone rings once before it’s answered.

“Rose. I was worried you wouldn’t call,” a woman says.

“Will Hanlon?” Rose says. “I was expecting a guy.”

“Will is short for Willamina. Did you get my texts?”

“Yes. I need to know more.”

“Your parents both grew up in a town called Derry, in Maine. They were part of a group here. The Losers Club. None of the club are around anymore, but their kids are. I’m getting them all together.”

“But… Why? My parents never mentioned any of these people, they can’t have been that important. No offence.”

“Haven’t you ever had something where it meant so much to you, but you never told another soul? Something you might have been able to mention a hundred times, that is so important to you, but that you never told anyone? Either cus you didn’t have the words or because you knew they wouldn’t understand like you did?”

Rose does not know the last time someone ever said something so personal to her out of nowhere. She gapes silently for a few moments, clueless as to what she could say to that. After a little while, Will speaks again, voice calm.

“We’re meeting September 8th, in Derry. Please come. Your parents will have letters by a man named Stanley Uris somewhere. Bring those.”

Rose wants to say she’s crazy, but she can’t find the words. The mentioning of the letters has thrown her; up until that point she had almost been willing to believe this was all the insane work of a stranger that had found her parents’ information online, but who would be able to say they knew about the two letters her parents had pressed into the back of their safe? 

Phone calls make Joseph nervous. Most things do, but he doesn’t like talking on the phone unexpectedly. If he has to make a call, he likes to plan out what he has to say first, so he doesn’t screw it up. And if someone calls him, they text first. He always tells them, _text first_. If they don’t then that means they must not know him, and if they don’t know him, he doesn’t want to talk to them. But if you ignore a phone call you might be ignoring an emergency, and that’s the last thing he wants to do. Joseph is always ready for an emergency. 

When his cell phone rings he eyes it across the desk in a blind panic, eyes popping huge in his skull as he tries to think about what to do. He could just let it ring out. Are other people in the office angry his phone went off unexpectedly? He swivels around to look at the people nearest to him, but he can’t tell if Rodney in the next cubicle has completely fucked up his accounts because he got distracted by Joseph’s factory default ringtone. He _can’t_ just leave it to ring out, though. That would definitely be annoying. And if he answered it? In the middle of the office? Oh, no. No, no.

Joseph grabs his phone and scurries away before he realises he forgot his keycard, darts back to grab that feeling like his entire face is going to burn off, before he makes it to the breakroom. There’s no one there, so he feels alright huddling by the coffee machine and answering the call. He hopes Margret doesn’t come by and see he’s not at his desk. He doesn’t have a break for twenty minutes. She probably wouldn’t mind, but maybe? What if she did this time? He was late three days ago, and she noticed. Was she keeping track of all the minutes he was meant to be working? Every little second of wasted company time? He needed to have those numbers processed by three...

“Hello?” He says into the phone, his voice squeaky with anxiety.

“Joseph Fosse?” 

“Y-yeah? Is everything ok?” He plucks at the buttons on the front of his shirt. He has a bad habit of breaking them off, the threads giving way to his picking. He’s good at sewing them back on, at least.

“I’m calling about your father.”

“Greg? What about him? Is he ok?” Visions of ambulances dance through his head. 

“Who? Oh… No, not your stepfather. Your birth father.”

Joseph’s first reaction is to laugh, but he just ends up making a kind of startled coughing noise. He whips his head around again to make sure no one noticed. 

“I don’t…” He doesn’t even know where to begin. “You should talk to my Mom about this. Not me. I don’t- didn’t… I barely knew him.”

“No, I need to talk to you.”

“She’d… She’s the one with the information, and everything, not that there is much. Not relevant stuff, or up-to-date stuff… Is he… Sorry, do you know him? My… My father?” 

It feels weird to say that. He never called Greg ‘Dad’, but most other people made that assumption for him. When people asked after Joseph’s father, they generally meant the guy who had been married to his mother for over twenty years, who had watched him grow up, helped him through school, paid for college, helped him get a decent job at a good financial consultants, not the guy who had walked out into the night when Joseph was five. There was nothing to say about him, nothing Joseph could say, at least. It was a story that had been run through so many times with the finest of combs until all they could do was admit there was nothing to find. On paper, officially, when people asked, he had stopped caring about it a long time ago. You have to stop caring about something like that. 

He had been desperate for resolution as a child, had hung onto the idea his father could, at any moment, walk back into his life as suddenly as he’d walked out of it. It hadn’t happened. In fact, Edward Kaspbrak had never walked into anything ever again. He had driven out of New York and off the face of the planet. Joseph did not believe in ‘closure’ any more than he believed in Santa Claus.

Someone offering him up Santa on a plate has his teeth chattering in his skull.

“No, I don’t know him. Joseph, I’m sorry if no one ever told you this, but Edward Kaspbrak died twenty-seven years ago,” the woman on the phone says.

“Oh. Well. Yes, I always thought as much.” He blinks very quickly to try and stop himself from tearing up. It doesn’t work. 

“I can give you more answers, if you want.”

“You can… Sorry, you can what?”

“I know why he left, and I know what happened to him. My name is Will Hanlon. My father, Mike Hanlon, was good friends with your father. They were together when he died.”

Joseph takes a huge gulp of air, his chest catching. He leans on the counter by the sink, steadying himself. The image of a turtle stuck on its back, waving its legs in the air and unable to right itself pops into his head seemingly out of nowhere, fully formed and inexplicably deeply disturbing in its helplessness. He squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates on the way the cool tile feels on his hand to stop himself from completely spinning out of his body. 

“This is a lot to take in,” he says. 

“I understand. Your Dad was from a town called Derry, in Maine. A group of us are meeting on September 8th. If you can make it, there’ll be answers. A full story. You might… If your mother hasn’t thrown it out, there might be a letter from a guy called Stanley Uris. Bring that with you.”

He struggles in silence, air coming out in shocked little gulping sounds. He wants to sit down but there's not a chair near him so he just tries to lean himself against the counter and then worries someone is staring so he pushes himself back upright, then worries he looks like he's doing pushups and maybe someone will think _that's_ weird. Oh, God. 

"I need… To go back to work," he says, breathlessly. "This is all… I don't know. Very strange. You should talk to Mommy, I mean, my Mom, she knows all this stuff I don't know… Anything, really, about a-anything, except maybe, uh, uh, maintaining data processing systems but if you don't need help with--"

"Joseph, stop. I'm not talking to your Mom, I'm talking to you."

"I'm not good at decisions…"

"Then get better. We're all meeting here. There's going to be answers."

He has always suspected his father was dead. It makes sense. The car he had left New York in had been found in the street in some random town they'd never heard of, who no one had ever heard Edward Kaspbrak mention. Camera footage had shown he'd been staying at a hotel, he'd been seen at a pharmacy picking up prescription medication but that was it. He'd had the foresight to arrange for lodging and for his medication to be sent over, but after that he had just been gone. Other people staying at the hotel had no memory of seeing him, let alone ever speaking to him. Joseph had gone over all this, a hundred times, looking for some kind of new clue that might answer a question, but there was none. There was nothing. Edward Kaspbrak had vanished like a forgotten dream. That didn't happen to _alive_ people. 

There is still something crushing about knowing you were right the whole time. Joseph had never believed his father would come back someday because his Mom had never allowed him to entertain the idea; in her mind, her ex-husband was as good as dead, even before he was legally declared dead, and that was what Joseph had been raised to believe. But his mother didn't get to decide what Joseph dreamed about, and in his dreams, sometimes his father was the hero, who pulled him out of the trauma of high school and took him away on whatever adventure was so important it meant abandoning your wife and son. He never really thought those dreams would be real, but even at thirty-two years old, he feels their loss when they die inside the lonely thirteen year old he had locked in his heart. 

_This is what grief is,_ he thinks.

"I don't know if I want anymore answers," he says. "They're very hard to hear, actually, and pretty scary. So, maybe it would be better if I just forgot all about them, and didn't know anything."

"Your dad would be really disappointed to hear that."

"Well, what the… F… He-Heck does he know? He ran away from his whole family. I don't care if I have his approval, if he ran off to die just over nothing."

"He died a hero. I'll tell you all about it, if you come."

"This is really… This is really unfair. You're being very unfair."

"You come here, hear about my Dad, then I'll tell you about _fair_."

He's never even left New York. Joseph wants to tell her no, hang up the call and never think about it again. Unfortunately, dropping things and not thinking about them is not in his nature. He still worries about the time he fainted in the school play when he was twelve. He threw out his lunch yesterday because he tore the packaging on the sandwich and couldn't be sure his big hadn't contaminated it, like not really _sure_. He knows if he hangs up the phone he will never be able to stop wondering what this stranger knows about how his dad died. More than that, he can't stop thinking about the word 'hero'.

It's four o'clock and George is opening his first beer of the day. He'd told himself he wasn't going to start, but if he doesn't get something in him he's never going to be able to think clearly enough to write. One and done, and then back to the grindstone. Or, back to the expensive antique typewriter he has in the study. Working on a computer was too distracting, so he went simple. Can't fuck around and waste time on a typewriter. That was the way all the proper writers did it a hundred years ago, back when books were real, and not just pulp churned out to tie into a movie or video game or whatever. He made a decent living writing tie-in books, of course, under a different name, but he didn't pretend that was _art._ That was just so he didn't have to ask his Mom to pay his rent. 

The one beer is gone a little faster than George would like, but he tells himself if he has too many he's not going to get anywhere. He can have another after he's done for the day. This is good writing time; he's going to go back to the study, sit down, and work sensibly. The important part is to build a routine; if you get into the habit of sitting down and writing every day, then it's easy. He just needs to start the habit. Starting is the hardest part.

The blank sheet of paper in his typewriter stare back at him as he slouches in the doorway, staring at the huge metal contraption that squats on his writing desk like a turtle with a huge, shining shell. He rubs his thumb over the condensation on the outside of the bottle and imagines picking up the typewriter, throwing it out of the window and watching it explode into a million pieces, its metal guts spread across the driveway, a tortoise with a shattered shell. Ground down into oblivion.

He finishes the rest of the bottle and tosses it over his shoulder where it hits the wall over the garbage can in the kitchen and explodes into pieces. The roomba, detecting a disturbance, zips across the floor. He hates it. He finds its imitations of life and movement unsettling. Too bad all the books about robots have already been written, hundreds of years before they even had the things. George got to grow up in a world with robots all around him, and found he was too late to write about what that would be like. Felt like he was too late for most things.

He finally sits down at the desk and looks at the blank paper. The novel sits in his mind, a fat, glossy book with his name embossed on the cover. George Denbrough, emphasis on the _George_. He can see it so clearly there, it doesn't make sense to him that he can't force the words out of him now. He's written almost a dozen books, technically. This shouldn't be any different. 

Except obviously it is and obviously he is still sitting there with the blank paper a void of information, holding his eCig in his hand, when his phone goes off. He's grateful, weirdly. It's something to do other than have the page yawn at him, a void that is almost icy in its cold emptiness. He whips his phone out of his pocket and is perturbed by it being an unrecognised number. Still, maybe that'll be more entertaining. He drags on his cigarette and answers.

"Go for George," he drawls.

"Hi, George." It's a woman. She sounds tired. "My name is Will Hanlon. I need to talk to you about your father."

"If this is another biographer, I'm not interested. The old man didn't leave fuckin' squat, ok? No diaries, no letters, no notes. He burned his unfinished work, I _know_ you know that, _everyone_ knows that." 

He'd tried to stop him at the time. Had arrived at his parents vacation home in the Hudson Valley, a place his father had left less and less in the final couple of years, to find his mother storming around the living room in a foul mood. George had asked her what was wrong and she'd gestured at the garden, where his father was crouched over a huge bonfire, wordless with anger. His mother wasn't one for that kind of soundless, bitter rage, so he ran outside immediately, the family dog chasing after him, yapping with excitement as George raced over the grass.

"Dad, what the fuck are… What the hell are you _doing_ ?" He said, watching as his father tipped crates of notebooks and papers into the flames. George lunged for him to try and wrest the boxes away, but his dad shoved him back with a hand to his chest. Even at sixty-five, even when his memory was failing him, Bill Denbrough was not a frail man; he cycled competitively, and George had always been disconcerted by the severity in his piercing blue eyes. George's eyes are the same colour, but he has never mastered the way his father could _look_ at someone and make them fall into line. He resents this.

"I don't want this stuff knocking around," Bill said. "Not after I'm gone. It'll just get in the way."

"It's your life's work, Pops," George said, "it should be in a fuckin' museum!" 

"It should be in a nice leather-bound collection called _From the Desk of William Denbrough_ , you mean. Make a good buck off that." 

"Oh, fucking thank you, Dad. Jesus Christ, is that what you think of me? Have you taken your pills today?"

"Yes, I've taken my pills. Stop swearing so much, you're worse than Richie."

"Who the hell is _Richie_?"

His dad had stopped for a second then, staring off into the distance at the trees at the edges of the grounds, swaying gently in the evening air. All the leaves were turning that vivid orange and gold the tourists went apeshit for; at that time, his Dad had stared at them transfixed and mouthed, almost imperceptibly, _January embers_.

Then he continued throwing handfuls of papers onto the fire. George grabbed one of the cases, trying to pull it to safety, but Bill just flipped it over and poured the contents into the open flames. George screamed with frustration, letting go and throwing his hands into the air.

"Fine, Pops, fuck it all. Jesus Christ. You're sixty-five, not a hundred and five. Talking about dying… You're going to goddamn regret this next month when you get back to trying to write but you burned all your fuckin' notes, and I'm not gonna help you…"

He'd taken a moment to pull out his eCig when his Dad, watching the rippling flames, had said:

"This place always feels… So close to the truth. Like a shadow of what I'm missing. But it's never right. It's never right. I suppose it could never be again. It was all spoiled, without Stanley. Nothing was ever the same. I suppose that was what went wrong. It needed to be all seven of us there."

"Who the fuck is _Stanley?_ "

Bill had sighed. "I don't remember." 

The last of his books burned in the firepit, becoming nothing but cold, dark ash, and three weeks later Bill Denbrough drove his silver Lincoln off the side of a cliff.

"I know," Will Hanlon says in the present day, two years after Bill died. "My father and your father were best friends, growing up. His name was Mike Hanlon."

There were names, towards the end of his Dad's life, that George had started to pick up on. He had never known if they were characters from the last book that never got written, or people his father had known once; Richie, Stan, Eddie, Beverly… and Mike. Mike had been the one that unsettled George the most, because he had never seen his father say the name without tears growing in his eyes, and because;

"My middle name is Michael," George says. "You're Will, and my old man was William. I'm Michael, and your Dad was Mike. Funny."

"Hold on. Your name is _George Michael_?"

"Jesus Christ, Will, I'm trying to connect with you here about our fuckin' dead dads. Fuck me for trying." 

"Sorry, sorry. I just wanted to say… There are things you don't know about your father."

"I knew what was important. He always thought he was right, he wouldn't take no for an answer, he was _definitely_ cheating on my Mom, and he always had to have it his way. And he thought I was soft and had it easy. That about sum it up?" 

"Not really."

George takes another drag. The white paper stares at him and he turns his desk chair around to not face it anymore, looking at the large Van Gogh print he has on the wall. If he'd sold his Dad's notes he probably could have bought a real Van Gogh. 

"Well then," George says, leisurely. "What's your wisdom, Miss Will?"

"I'll tell you. September 8th, Derry, Maine. Your Dad's hometown. Your father will have a letter from a guy called Stanley Uris. Bring that with you."

George thinks about the flames shooting up as his dad poured more papers onto them. Unlikely. 

"I'll be there."

"Didn't need much convincing as some of the others."

"They don't need a good story as bad as I do."


	2. A Reunion

September is cool and fine that year. Will sits on the swing in her front yard and waits for people to arrive. She has been preparing for this for the last week, and for her entire life. Her father never told her a lie, and he never hid a single thing from her, not once. She was seven years old when she first found his notes on the history of Derry, and while he didn't tell her the full story until she was old enough to know it all, he never lied to her. Her Mom always hated that; she thought Will's Dad was irresponsible at best, crazy at worst. But Will never cared. Her Dad was her best friend. 

This is her first year without him, and it is the year everything has begun again. They had both suspected this would be the case, but it had seemed so improbable that Mike Hanlon would ever die. He was almost seventy and still fit and young as ever, even though his hair had gone snow-white by the time he was fifty. The two of them would work in his garden, digging up the earth so he could plant the next batch of tomatoes or squash, hot in the sun, and she could still only just keep up with him, or they'd work on the old car they had the garage they'd been patching up for years. 

"Me and my Dad built a car, me and you can build a car," he'd explained. His old memories of his father were the guiding light by which he parented. But Will would have done anything with her father; ever since she could walk she trotted at his heels like a puppy, following him around the library or, later, the little homestead he had, always grasping for her Dad's gentle hand. If he wanted to build a car, she'd help him build a car, even if gas cars had gone the way of the Dodo before she was driving. 

For a while, she'd started to let herself believe he wouldn't die. That he'd make it. He would always just say the same thing, that he knew what happened already, but Will had still let herself hope he was wrong. He was a wonderful man, that didn't mean he was never wrong, and if there was a thing to ever be wrong about, it was this. Unfortunately, all the hoping in the world didn't stop her from coming home from work one day and finding him slumped in his chair in the living room, a book still propped open in his lap like he'd nodded off in the middle of reading. It was so sudden, so peaceful, as if he'd just decided to step out of the room for a second and quietly closed the door behind him, but it still hit Will as if the house collapsed in on her.

Half the town came to the funeral. She thinks maybe even IT did; things began right away. IT really had been waiting for her father to go, like Mike had always suspected. The cowardice of that made Will smug. It was like having her every suspicion confirmed; her father was a hero, and IT was afraid of him. 

IT should be afraid of her too.

She had been waiting her whole life for signs, saw them right away. The children going missing, vanishing out from under the noses of their parents and of the all-seeing eyes of video security. The kind of thing that just wasn’t supposed to happen in a surveillance state; the sort of thing that anywhere other than Derry would have police tearing apart the town. Even the time it took waiting for everyone to arrive felt too long, like wasted moments of opportunity after decades of waiting for her time to come. 

The first car that pulls up is a cab, a girl Will’s own age stepping out of the back and paying the driver with a tap of her phone. She is tall and broad-shouldered with close-cropped brown hair, wearing a long flowy blue coat and leather boots that look showy rather than practical. Her face is square, sharp-jawed, and she looks at Will with a pair of cool, dark eyes, brows knotted in concern.

“Are you Will?” She says. “I’m Rose. Hanscom-Marsh.”

“You’re the first one here,” Will says. 

“There’s four more coming?” 

“That’s right. You get in from New Hampshire today?”

“Yeah, I got the train. I expected you to be older.”

“I’m old enough.”

Rose flashes her a quick smile. In the street, a modest looking sedan parks on the sidewalk opposite and a woman in her late thirties or early forties, dressed in a grey suit gets out. She’s wearing sunglasses and has her dreadlocks pulled back into a tight ponytail, her suit neatly pressed, everything about her straight and organised. The car is definitely a rental; there’s no way this woman would own a car that cost less than $50,000, let alone a five-year old sedan. She spies Will and Rose, looking over the top of her glasses at them, before she walks over to lean on the swingset by Will.

“You’re Will,” she says, guessing correctly. “And you’re…?”

“Rose Hanscom-Marsh. You are?”

“Zara Ortiz. I guess you weren’t lying about there being six of us. Although there’s definitely still time for you to have been lying about the rest.” She talks in a very matter-of-fact way, nothing malicious in her voice, only the simple understanding that this could, very well, all be total bullshit. 

“I could be,” Will says, mildly. She thinks she likes Zara Ortiz. Zara has sharp cheekbones and, under the shades, large, round, very expressive eyes, and she raises her eyebrows at Will in a way that makes her laugh.

The next person to arrive swings his huge SUV into Will’s driveway without any consideration for the fact he’s blocking off her garage door and slams the door open wide. The guy who gets out would be handsome, has real movie star looks, but is incredibly scruffy and unkempt. His prematurely greying hair falls into his eyes and his jaw is covered in stubble; he has bags under his eyes, and is wearing a flannel shirt and sweats. He stays in the driver’s seat and just swings around, looking out at the assembled group, the worn-out timberlands he’s wearing kicking against the side of the car. 

“Well, this is a motley crew,” he says. “George Denbrough.”

He has pale blue eyes that watch each of them accusingly as he sucks on an eCig, the tip glowing brightly, and Will understands he’s waiting to see if any of them recognise him. No one says anything. Something about that makes her smirk.

The next arrival is another cab, a short, lithe guy in a shirt and tie whose huge dark eyes watch everyone with some trepidation before he manages to pluck up the courage to walk over the front lawn towards them. He walks in quick darting movements, as if something is about to leap out and grab him. His hands fidget nervously at the buttons of his shirt.

“Joseph Fosse,” Will says, sure of who it is even before he gets a chance to speak.

“Y-yeah,” he says, looking even more unsure of himself now he’s been recognised, plucking at his buttons and then, as if he’s suddenly realised he shouldn’t be doing that, cramming his hands into his pants pockets. One of them keeps twitching, like he’s fucking around with spare change or an old ticket, or something. He glances around at the four of them, but George winks and he looks away again quickly, as if embarrassed about his existence.

“Nearly everyone,” Zara says. “You sure the last guy will come?”

“Oh, yeah. Out of everyone, the only one I was more sure of was George. You were the one who made me doubt,” Will says. 

“Really? Interesting. I guess no one else told you this was all crazy?”

“No, it’s crazy,” Rose says.

“But we all showed up,” Zara says.

“Guess we’re all crazy,” George says, grinning with too many teeth and not enough humour. Joseph is pale.

The final car does arrive. It pulls up on the sidewalk in front of Will’s eyes, another rental, a man with curly dark hair wearing a football jersey stepping out. He pushes his glasses back up his nose and frowns deeply at the assembled group. For a moment he looks like he might climb back into the car and drive away, but he walks over to them all, coming to stand beside Joseph. 

“This is everyone,” he says, “I’m guessing.”

“Daniel Uris,” Will says.

“Uris?” Rose looks at him. “You know a Stanley Uris?”

“Know him? No,” Dan says. “But that was my father.”

“Let’s go inside,” Will says, getting off the swing. “There’s a lot to talk about.”

They sit around the kitchen table and Will pours glasses of iced tea. She doesn’t normally host people in her house and it’s not made for groups this big; it was just her and Dad for the last twenty-five years, and they’re all crammed in elbow-to-elbow around the table. Joseph looks like he’s wilting a little next to the broader and louder George, who is entirely unbothered about elbowing him out of the way to gain a little more space but can’t do the same to Zara, who fixes him with a cool stare when he so much as brushes against her. Dan and Rose are more restrained, sitting neatly in the patio chairs Will hauled in to help make up for the lack of seats, just waiting for answers. The home is modest. Her Dad was a librarian and habitual farmer, Will works for the local parks department. If any of these others, who come from far, far richer backgrounds than her own speak on it, she thinks she might snap. 

There are several details about the situation weighing on Will like high pressure threatening to bring a storm. 

All of them have laid their letters out on the table, except George. Six of them, including Rose’s two. She’s left some of her father’s photograph albums on the table for the others to look through. George isn’t interested, but Joseph keeps leaning over to watch as Rose flicks through the pages, never asking to look himself but his eyes fixating on the face of his father in every picture. He chews his bottom lip. Zara looks a little, but Dan could only manage a quick glance before he has to look away, focusing on the shelf of books in the hall you can see through the kitchen door, as if he could muddle out the titles from this distance. Eventually, Will sits down with them all, placing an old, aged piece of paper on the table in front of them. 

“I told all of you to bring letters from a man named Stan Uris with you,” she says.

George is empty-handed and can only shrug his shoulders. 

“Told you, my Dad burned everything,” he says.

The others look at the letters around the table. All of them have nearly exactly the same text and message, other than Dan’s, and all have the same neat handwriting and signature at the bottom. No one there could deny it; all of their parents had known each other, and Stan. If there was nothing else, there was a connection. All of them look at each other, critical, curious, confused… All of them are thinking the same thing; that there must be an explanation. 

“One of our parents -- or in Rose’s case both -- came from here,” Will says. “Grew up here, maybe even born here. But you’ll never have heard them mention it. You’ll never have heard them talk about this place at all. Because they won’t remember it existed.”

They all watch her silently. George is smirking like he’s waiting for the punchline, Zara is clearly suspicious, but the others are grave-faced. 

“Fifty-four years ago, in 1989, all those parents -- Stanley Uris, Beverly Marsh, Ben Hanscom, Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier, and Bill Denbrough -- they would have been thirteen. Back in that summer, Bill Denbrough’s brother Georgie died. In fact, a lot of kids were dying or going missing. A lot of kids die and go missing in Derry, but no one ever seems to care. Bill wanted to know what had happened to his brother. So, he and his friends… They went to go find answers.”

“Richie Tozier the comedian?” George says. 

“Yeah,” Zara says.

“Fuck. What happened to him?”

“He died.”

George lets out a laugh, though no one else does.

“They, uh, they did find answers,” Will continued. “A thing, a thing we call ‘It’, that sometimes called itself ‘Pennywise’, it was hunting the children of Derry. Showing them their worst fears and feeding off them. The seven of them, they stopped it, for a while. But twenty-seven years later, it returned. My father, he’d ended up being the only one who stayed behind in Derry. Twenty-seven years he waited for Pennywise to show itself again, and when it did, he called everyone back. Your fathers, or mother. And five of them came back.”

Dan’s face is frozen, face expressionless, but Will can see the gears turning in his mind. Joseph is frowning, shaking his head, as if he can’t believe it.

“The six of them, they fought Pennywise again. And they killed it, again. Thought they killed it for good that time. The five who were left, they all left Derry. But the thing about It is that it’s got this little trick to defend itself; makes you forget it as soon as you get too far away. And my Dad, he realised he was forgetting again. And if he was forgetting again… Then it couldn’t really be dead. So, he came back. He came back so he could wait another twenty-seven years. He spent his whole fuckin’ life waiting for it. And now, it’s back. Kids going missing, turning up dead. It thinks because the originals are gone, no one is gonna stop it.” Will looks at everyone there. “It’s wrong.”

There’s a hush. 

“You’re a lunatic,” Zara says.

“Are you -- what is this, an immortal serial killer?” Rose says. “This is insane.”

“This is worse than one of my Dad’s books,” George says.

“What the hell exactly are you suggesting?” Joseph says. “That my Dad died because of a childhood pact about a…  _ Pennywise? _ ” 

“I can’t…” Dan stands up, shoving his chair violently back under the table. “No. You can’t be using my father’s death as some prop for your insane conspiracy theory. This is… You’re sick. I don’t know why I came here, but it wasn’t so you could tell me this garbage. I’ve never been disrespected like this in my life.”

Will places on the table a book, the size and proportions of a photo album. Immediately, George grabs it and flicks it open, eyes glued to the pages with the enthusiasm of someone tearing into a really juicy piece of gossip. Zara and Rose both lean over, but Joseph remains seated, eyes flicking nervously between Will and Dan as Dan backs away.

“This is my Dad’s collection of information. It explains everything,” she says. “All the evidence, all the history.” 

“I’m not reading your manifesto. I’m out of here. This is nuts. You’re all insane,” 

“He’s right,” Joseph says, the gratitude in his voice that someone else spoke up immediately obvious. “I have to get out of here. This is crazy. I don’t know why I even came.”

Will doesn’t say anything as they leave, just watches them walk out. She is unconcerned, because she knows they will return. Derry gets its claws into you.


	3. Ghost of the Past

Dan is furious. That other guy -- Joe -- is following him out, shoulders hunched and face twisted with what Dan thinks must be embarrassment. Yeah, it is embarrassing. He feels immediately sympathetic towards the only other guy with the mind to leave.

“I don’t know why I came either,” Dan says. 

“I do know,” Joseph says, miserably. “Dads, right?”

“Right.”

He realises suddenly this guy is probably older than him; he doesn’t know why he thought he was younger, just perceives something so vulnerable in the way Joseph cringes away from the world like it’s going to bite him that Dan instinctively feels like he needs someone to take care of him. He seems… Sheltered, maybe. Or just neurotic, which Dan can also sympathise with a little bit. 

“You… I don’t want to be like, presumptuous, but you… Didn’t really know your Dad either?” Joseph says, talking like he’s scared the wind will change and throw the words back in his face. 

“No, he died before I was born.” Dan jingles his car keys in his pockets. “He killed himself. I always knew I was never gonna know why, like I made peace with that. But as soon as someone promises me answers…”

“I get it. My father, my birth father, he left when I was five. Just walked out of the house, never came home. And his last known location was… Here… So, even though I’ve spent years thinking… Y’know, he was probably dead in a ditch somewhere… I guess I was hoping I’d be able to find out something… I don’t know.”

“I guess I was hoping something would make it  _ okay _ ,” Dan says. “Like if there was a really good reason I’d just be able to go ‘oh, sure Dad! I get it now! I get why you left your unborn son and your wife and your friends. But I don’t think there’s ever going to be something that makes me say that. And it sure as fuck won’t be evil ghosts.”

They look at each other and Dan feels like he recognises something in Joseph. He wants to cling to that, reaches out to pat Joseph on the arm, but Joseph shies away from him, skittishly.

“You need a ride back to the train station, or… I don’t know, the airport?” Dan says.

“No, it’s uh, it’s ok, I’m uh, I’m just… Gonna go for a walk. Clear my head,” Joseph says. 

“Sure, man. Sorry about… Everything.”

“Me too.”

Dan watches Joseph slouch off down the street and gets into his rental car. It tells him that it will need its battery charged soon, and he sighs heavily. He remembers passing a charging station in town; he guesses it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t get to the airport right away. He tells his phone to find him the next flight to Atlanta and is told he’ll have to get a load of connecting flights. Getting a flight here with no connections was a stroke of luck that won’t be repeated, apparently. He’s regretting this more and more by the second as he drives away, leaving Will’s house in the rearview mirror. He passes Joseph as he drives by, but doesn’t stop to say anything. If the guy wants to be alone, he wants to be alone.

He passes the Derry synagogue and remembers distantly that his grandfather was the rabbi there, once upon a time, but it’s already behind him by the time he remembers and he doesn’t stop. He reaches the charging station on the edge of town, which was clearly once a gas station that has been converted. They probably don’t build anything new in Derry that often; he doesn’t think the houses around here have been updated since the 2000’s. Having lived in Atlanta his whole life, he’s used to cities with a little more growth and industry than this place… The skeletal ironworks he drove past on his way in tell him a story of a place that’s been struggling ever since the industries around it started shutting down. The charging station is empty when Dan pulls in, only a vague figure sitting in the teller’s booth inside. Clearly Derry hasn’t switched over to full automation. Maybe that’s for the best. 

He’s plugging the car into charge when he notices the man, standing by the door of the station. The man is dressed in a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes, which are cast in shadow. He looks like something from the thirties. The 1930s, not that weird trend in the 2030s for 2001 retro, whatever that had been about. Dan is thinking about both the double denim he used to wear as a teenager that his mother said was terrible -- infuriatingly she had been right -- and about how out of place the stranger looks when the man calls him name. There is little that is quite as disconcerting as hearing your name in a place you aren’t expecting to hear it, especially when it comes from the mouth of a total stranger.

Dan looks around, like there’s a chance another Daniel Uris is standing next to him. 

“Daniel Uris,” the man says again.

The man is walking towards him. Dan backs up and hits the side of the car, leaning backwards. Dan does not like and he does not trust men in suits, or people who work for the government. He has said some things in the past that would perhaps not be seen favourably by people in authority if they were seen; these things and others run through his mind when the stranger approaches him.

The man is much taller than Dan realised at first somehow, and has huge black sunglasses on under his hat. When he talks, his mouth moves stiffly, the little muscles in his face almost reluctant to let the words out, lips contorting in ugly ways.

“Wh… Hello?” Dan says, fear rising in his voice embarrassingly quickly. “Who are you?”

“I’m with the FBI. I think it’s best if you come with me,” the man says. 

He is standing less than half a foot away from Dan, and Dan can see that there is not a single hair on his body. His skin is whiter than porcelain, but there’s an uneven texture to it that catches Dan’s eye. Like paint, or makeup laid on too thickly.

“Hang on, I’m not going anywhere with you,” Dan says. “Not until I see some ID.”

The man is holding Dan’s upper arm; his hand is so cold that Dan can feel it through his Falcons jersey. He tries to wrest his arm out of the man’s grip, but the man’s hand is like a steel bar and there’s nothing Dan can do to stop himself from being hauled towards the store. He tries to pull back, but the FBI Agent -- unlikely -- drags him inside and almost throws him across the room. 

Dan slips on the floor and crashes down against a chair, the seat hitting the middle of his back. He scrambles up enough to be sitting in it rather than against it, and looks around the shop frantically. None of the shelves of chips and candy he’d seen outside are present inside; the windows are covered with a thick, smoky plastic that turns the outside world into a mosaic of abstract colour, the walls are covered with a black, rubberised material that has left a weird sticky residue on his hand where he inadvertently touched it. He looks from his hand to the FBI Agent, who is locking the door. 

“Hang on, hang on, what the hell is going on here? You can’t just do this,” Dan says, trying to get up out of the chair before the Agent pushes him back down into it with one steely hand. 

“Mr Uris, we’ve been watching you for a long time now,” the man says.

“Wh… What are you talking about? I’m just a sports journalist, I don’t understand…” Dan says.

The Agent sits down in a chair opposite him, leaning back. Dan’s eyes flick down and notice that, absurdly, in the lowlight the buttons on the Agent’s suit seem to be strange orange pompoms. He doesn’t get a chance to think, though, because the Agent is showing him a blurry black and white photograph too close to his face for Dan to focus. It takes a second, but he realises it’s of himself and his mother, from a distance, grainy and badly printed. As if it was taken from store security footage. 

“Is that my  _ Mom _ ?” Dan says, aghast. “What the hell is going on here? Why are you stalking me?”

“Why did you come to Derry, Mr Uris?” The Agent says.

“Th… That’s my own, personal business! You don’t have any right to tell me where I can and can’t go.”

“How well do you know your mother?”

“ _ What? _ ”

“Do you think she’d ever have reason to hide things from you?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Of course I trust my Mom!”

“Do you? Or do you think she’s hiding things from you?” The more he talks the odder and odder his voice sounds, as if he’s forgetting how human beings speak, the voice bubbling out in uneven, ugly chuckles.

“What the fuck… Everyone hides some shit, that’s just life! Am I being detained? I have rights!”

“Do you,” the Agent says, placidly. He’s smiling. 

“Yes! You can’t just arrest me and not tell me what for. You can’t hold me against my will. You can’t…”

“We can do anything. You think you have  _ rights _ ? Do you really expect us to believe you don’t know what they’ve done, your parents? That you don’t know all the things they did?”

Sweat is pouring down Dan’s face. He tries to fight to speak and can’t, because he is scared that he will give away too much. All at once, every time he has ever doubted his parents, every time he has ever thought  _ what if something I don’t know will hurt me?  _ is pouring back into his mind, every tiny insignificant moment of questioning paranoia is springing up again. How could he not have doubts and fears, over the years? He trusts his mother, loves her, but that doesn’t mean he’s never thought… Never wondered… 

“Tell me, Danny, you really know your Mommy? You don’t ever think she was holding things from you? Bad,  _ baaaad _ things?” The Agent leans in closer and Dan tries to lean away, seeing the strange long cracks of red spiraling up from his lips and over his cheeks. “Things that will hurt you later?”

“I d-don’t… I don’t know,” Dan says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My father was an accountant, Mom is a teacher, I don’t…”

“You never looked into it? Stanley Uris kills himself for no reason at all, and you never tried to find out why?” The Agent actually  _ giggles _ , and Dan can only stare in revolted horror. “You believe everything you hear, Daniel Uris?”

“No,” Dan gasps.

The sunglasses on the Agent’s face slip down a little and reveal one rolling, yellow-coloured eye that slowly spins in its socket like something caught in the swirl of water rushing down a drain. Dan, his body already tense with revulsion, gags and looks away, staring at the dirty, dark floor. There is a handprint on the dust on the ground. He glances from that and back to the Agent, who is still smiling.

“You believe your father was a good man? You think he was a hero? You think what he did was heroic?” The Agent says.

“What did he do?” Dan says.

“You want to know?”

“No… I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Your father was a coward, Danny. He was a coward, and he let everyone down, because he was running from all the bad,  _ bad _ things he did. And Mommy dearest, she just covered it all up. You didn’t ever wonder what happened to Daddy’s past? You didn’t ever think something was missing? Are you stupid, Danny? And now  _ you’re  _ in trouble, all because Mommy and Daddy never told stupid, ignorant little Danny  _ aaaaanything _ .”

Dan lurches out of his seat again and tries to make a break for the door, but the arms of the Agent are impossibly long and fast and they’re on him, hands grabbing the back of his jersey and yanking him back like he’s an unruly child. Dan screams and fights back, fists hammering on the Agent’s chest, but he’s never been in a fight in his life and it’s like striking his hands against a giant steel drum. The Agent is giggling again, maniacally so, and Dan feels almost delirious with confusion and fear. Logically he knows that fighting a cop is probably the worst thing he could do in any given situation, but nothing about this is  _ logical _ . Nothing in Dan’s life has made sense for a good while now.

The Agent -- or whatever it is, Dan has stopped believing that it is even truly human -- grabs Dan’s jaw in one hand, a hand that is wearing a worn white glove -- and twists his face so that he is forced to stare it in its horrible, rolling eyes. A long string of drool is forming on its lower lip.

“Please,” Dan says, “I just wanna go home.”

“Wanna run away and  _ hiiiide _ ?” It croons at him. Its voice seems to emanate from some place deeper than the body that is holding him; it rumbles out through the carcass it wears and when it speaks, Dan is sure he can hear something else underneath it, like paint scratching off the walls to reveal the pattern of the paper beneath, paper covered in words you think you could understand if you just stayed and looked… A little bit longer…

Dan struggles, kicking out and trying to force himself away from the rows and rows of teeth he can now see behind the Agent’s bright red lips.

“Stanley ran away. He ran and he ran, but he couldn’t ever get away. He couldn’t get away from  _ me _ .”

The Agent’s suit is light grey. There are large orange pompoms on the front, and its face is caked in thick white makeup that is cracking around the edges to show something red and hideous beneath. It looks like… 

“What the fuck are you?” Dan cries.

“They all thought they got rid of me. But I won’t die that easy. You think you can just get rid of me like that?” It says. “You think I’ll go away with one little shove? I was there before their parents, and their parents before them. And I’ll be here when  _ your  _ children are old enough to see how much their Daddy screwed them up too. I am in every generation of lies and little secrets. Stan thought if he died, I’d die with him? I was already in you. I’ll  _ always  _ be in you.”

“You’re not… You can’t be real.”

“I’m not? Maybe you’re just crazy then, Daniel. Maybe crazy runs in the family. You’d never know. You’re never going to know the truth! Poor little ignorant Danny, waiting until Daddy’s mistakes come back to bite him! Are you going to be like your Dad, Dan? Going to be like scared little Stan, Dan? Hiding in the bathtub, all alone--”

Dan kicks It square in the chest and the force is finally enough to make It stumble back. It lets go of him and he’s gone then, leaping for the door and crashing into it with the full force of his body. 

It’s locked.

He scrambles madly for the deadbolt holding the door closed as the thing behind him slowly stretches up to its full height. It isn’t even pretending to be a man now; it’s something else. Red-orange hair springs from its head in odd angles, and It moves with jerky, awkward lurches, as though It’s loading poorly through a bad connection, filtering in and out. It begins to turn around.

Dan is pulling at the deadbolt. He heaves with all his strength, the metal bar staying strong and biting into his hand where he pulls on it. The thing rotates its head all the way around.

“You don’t want to stay and play with the clown?” It says, voice gurgling merrily.

Dan screams, louder than he’s ever screamed in his life, but the latch gives way and he’s sprinting out across the charging station towards his car, the clown thing laughing the entire time, the sound of it ringing in his ears. 

When he reaches the car he looks back and sees the store is empty. He blinks for a second, his eyes focusing on a sign that says PAY AT PUMP. There’s no indication that anyone was ever there at all. He’s shaking as he gets into the car, not waiting to see if it reappears. 

He’s pulling out of the charging station and driving back towards Will’s house before he even makes the decision to return.

Joseph sees Dan drive by and says nothing, just lowers his head and keeps marching on until Dan turns a corner and drives out of sight. Joseph is heading back into the middle of town, roughly following the route the taxi drove him. He doesn’t know why he wanted to walk back, only that he didn’t want to be sitting in the back of someone else’s car if he starts bawling his eyes out like a teenager. He feels like doing exactly that, like everything welling up inside him is going to burst out and make him vomit up feelings, hurling his guts up like a hysterical child. He staggers a little as he walks, avoiding the eyes of the people walking on the other side of the road, who are obviously freaked out by the weird man stumbling around their neighbourhood; he can see the concern in their eyes, knows they’re all staring at him. He keeps his head down.

Running away from Dan makes him feel kind of guilty too; he doesn’t know why. It’s not like he’s putting the guy out by not taking up his offer of help, but Joseph typically feels awful about everything, so maybe it’s not a surprise. His mother has rung him fifteen times and he hasn’t answered any of her calls since he got off the train, which is probably just about the most awful thing he could possibly do when she’s so scared of losing him, but he can’t bring himself to explain to her where he’s gone. She never allowed anyone to talk about his father, including him, would turn into something huge and furious and spiteful the rare few times Joseph had enough of a spine to push her. Not that he  _ blames _ her, he’s very grateful for everything his mom did for him. She’s always loved him very, very much and he knows he doesn’t make it easy, and running off to hunt out the father she never wanted him to even know about is so unfair of him. 

Joseph stops by the side of a store to try and catch his breath. He’s been walking too fast and he gets out of breath so easily, and his head is swimming. He’s almost in town now so he could… He doesn’t really know what he could do. He’s not the kind of person who just… Goes and does things. Normally he just stays at home, when he’s not at work. Plays video games. Travelling, wandering around unfamiliar towns, running off because he wants to… None of those are  _ him _ . God, what has gotten into him? He wants very badly to apologise for his presence, not that anyone around him has really noticed that he’s here, or cares. Will and the others are the only ones who even know he’s here. If he gets murdered no one will ever know.

In the store window, he sees his own reflection. Mousy brown hair, huge dark eyes, a long, pale face. Almost lipless mouth. When he was in high school the other kids used to call him  _ Fish _ , a mocking chant that still uncomfortably haunts his nightmares. He looks old, too, way older than he should at just past thirty. He blinks away the tears in his eyes -- fucking pathetic, grown man crying -- but the reflection doesn’t blink back.

No, that’s crazy. Of course it did. He just didn’t see it because his eyes were closed.  _ Get a fucking grip, _ he snarls at himself.  _ You’re going insane _ . 

He straightens up and the reflection does too, the exact same ramrod spine, clenched jaw, neatly parted hair. Ok, it’s fine. It’s ok. Was his hair always that dark? He touches it reflexively, but by the time he’s finished glancing up at his hair and back at his reflection, it looks fine. It was just a trick of the light, or something.  _ Stop questioning everything you see, everyone’s going to think you’re a conspiracy theorist. _

The cashier inside is staring at him with a confused expression on her face so Joseph darts away and scuttles off down the street. They probably don’t have pills in there that will stop you from being crazy. He heads closer to the town centre.

It’s weird to think this is the town his father grew up in. He knows so little about his own father that it’s hard for him to imagine what Edward Kaspbrak might have done as a kid, especially because his dad grew up in a time before the internet, which is bizarre for Joseph to even try to conceptualise. What did kids do back at that time? Run around in the wild, where they could get hurt or sick with no supervision whatsoever? It’s no small wonder so many kids here used to go missing, there’s a million things out there in the world that could kill them with no one there to do a damn thing about it, or ever find out. Joseph shivers. He’s a little grateful his mother kept him in where it was safe as a kid. 

Maybe Edward Kaspbrak would have pushed him to go out more, if that’s what  _ he  _ did as a kid. Derry is a fairly rural town, would have been even more so back in the day when the town was smaller. Plenty of wilderness to explore, to ride bikes in, a river to swim in. Joseph is looking around when he collides with the opening door of a small pharmacy. The man opening the door yells with surprise.

“Good lord, son, I nearly knocked your head clean off!” He says. “You oughta look where you’re going.”

“Y-yeah, I’m really sorry,” Joseph says, automatically. 

“No, no, I should have been more careful too. C’mere,” the man says. 

He looks like he’s roughly a hundred years old, a tiny wizened old man with a thin thatch of white hair and huge, ancient glasses on his face. He’s wearing a white jacket that marks him out as the pharmacist, and a name tag that says his name is KEENE. His skin is the colour and texture of crepe paper and Joseph flinches when the man grabs him by the jaw and twists his head from side to side to look at the damage he’s caused. There’s a small bleeding cut in the centre of Joseph’s forehead.

“You better come in here, we can get that cleaned up,” Mr Keene says.

“Oh… I don’t want to be a bother…” Joseph says.

“Nonsense. I did that to you, I better get it sorted out. Don’t want it getting  _ infected _ now, do we?” 

Joseph can’t argue because Keene has him by the wrist and is dragging him into the pharmacy. It’s empty of other customers, the shelves crammed full with all kinds of outdated junk. Joseph catches a glimpse of what is definitely outdated medication, the box yellow and dusty with age. Christ, what kind of a place is this? Is that an actual cash register? What the fuck…

Keene drags Joseph into a back room and sits him down on a stool that’s too small and slips underneath him when he leans backwards. He’s much stronger than would be expected for such an old man, with a worryingly vice-like grip. He turns away to look in an old tin first aid kit screwed to the wall as Joseph looks around the office. The room is small and cramped, large eerie cardboard boxes taking up a lot of the available space. The one nearest Joseph looks damp in a way he really doesn’t like and he leans away from it.

“You know,” Mr Keene says as he pries open the first aid kit with his long fingernails. “You look a hell of a lot like a kid I used to know.”

“My father was from here,” Joseph says, cautiously. 

“Your father?” Mr Keene looks at him down his nose, through his huge glasses, which shimmer oddly in the dim light. “That wouldn’t be little Eddie Kaspbrak, would it?”

How the fuck could this guy have known Joseph’s father as a  _ kid _ ? He does look about a hundred years old, but Joseph figured he was just a really rough eighty… Maybe he’d been a teenager at the time, or something. 

“Yeah,” Joseph says, because it’s simpler. “You knew him?”

“Oh, yes,” Keene says. He’s coming at Joseph with a sanitary wipe that looks dried out and old in a way that Joseph really, really doesn’t want to have to feel on his skin, but he doesn’t feel like he has a way out of this. “That boy was always in and out of here. Very sickly child. All kinds of ailments. Have you checked if they’re hereditary?” 

Joseph wilts in his seat. “I’m… I’m ok.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t be so sure. That Kaspbrak boy… Delicate constitution, he had. Wasn’t surprised when he came back here later on and was just as ill. Sad, sad, little man.”

Joseph bites his lip as Keene roughly wipes his head and dabs on something that reeks of chemicals and stings like fresh hell when it’s put on. He flinches away.

“Now, don’t be such a baby. I suppose it makes sense that you’d be just as fragile as he was, though… Apple never falls very far from the tree.”

“I don’t know… I don’t know if that’s true,” Joseph says, weakly, but he’s never been very good at arguing with people and the words are strangled in his throat. 

“Of course it is. His father too, he died real young. Runs in the Kaspbrak family. You’ll be the same, I suppose.”

“N-no, you can’t say something like that, you…” He pauses. “How do you know my dad died?”

Mr Keene is applying a band-aid to Joseph’s face when he stops. He looks down at him, grotesquely grey tongue between his withered lips for a second. He reminds Joseph of a squat old toad.

“I know a lot of things about Edward Kaspbrak,” Mr Keene says. His voice is softer now, has somehow lost an edge of the rasp it did have, has become subtler and more poisonous. “I know he was  _ sick _ , sick on the inside, deep down in places they can’t ever fix. There’s no medicine that would ever fix a boy of what was wrong with him.”

“Can, uh, can I use the washroom?” Joseph squeaks, standing up off the stool and accidentally knocking it over in his rush, squeezing his way around the old man without trying to touch him. 

“Of course… Bad stomach is it? Just like your father. Always so sickly…” Keene leads him out of the office and points to the staff toilets opposite. Joseph wants to bolt for the exit, but Keene is in the way and he’s also gripped with the anxiety of looking rude, however absurd that is. He ends up walking into the little toilet and locking the door after him, hoping there’s a window or…

There’s not. Not like he’d have the strength to climb up the wall and get through one, anyway. He stares miserably at his own reflection in the dirty, water-stained mirror. It stares back at him, neatly parted hair slick to his head and face drawn with fear.

“He was a coward, your father. He was so scared, so scared of everything that he couldn’t even defend his friends,” Keene continued outside of the door, crooning the words to Joseph like a sick lullaby. “ _ So _ scared of being hurt or being ill… That’s the real sickness isn’t it? Cowardice? He was so twisted up inside, Eddie Kaspbrak, he didn’t even know who or what he was. But you know, don’t you? What you are?”

Joseph looks around the room. The tiny bulb over his head, naked and dangling from a wire, turns everything in the toilet a dingy yellow. There’s nothing in there other than what you would expect; an unpleasantly unclean toilet, a sink, a trashcan he wouldn’t touch if his life fucking depended on it. His reflection stares at him with incredibly sad, dark eyes. 

“All his friends would have died for him but he wouldn’t do the same for them! He was surrounded by people who loved and protected him, and he still failed and died, and he couldn’t save any one of them,” Keene continues through the door, rattling the handle. Joseph stumbles away from the door like it’s about to burst open, though the old man can’t be that strong, can’t possibly be able to rip a door off its hinges. “And what do you have, little Joseph? Not a person in the world who cares about you one bit. All alone, always all alone, aren’t you?”

Joseph tries to think of something to say but can’t, stares at the door and makes pathetic little wordless noises of argument, like a puppy that doesn’t understand why it’s being punished. Whimpering, basically. Joseph in the mirror stares right back out at him. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but his reflection looks too much older, and the colours look all wrong again, hair and eyes too dark.

When did he get a scar on his cheek?

“Daddy left you… You left Mommy… And not a single friend your whole life… If Daddy died like a loser even with all of his friends, what’s going to happen to you, Joseph? What’s going to happen to  _ you _ ?” He was laughing more and more as he talked, voice pitched high and maniacal, a screaming, ear-splitting laughter that made Joseph’s head hurt. “What’s going to happen to you?!”

Joseph whirls around, desperately looking for something, anything that could help him. The door is shaking and he can see that any second it’s going to fly open, that the old man is going to burst in and then… Then he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know what, but his mind is racing with the possibilities of what could happen, each more horrifying than the last. He needs to get out, his heart is hammering like a piston, he feels like he’s going to throw up, he’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to…

“That guy is a hundred years old, what the hell is he going to do? Give you a cough drop?” Joseph’s reflection says.

“Oh my God, I’m losing my fucking mind,” Joseph says, voice cracking, staring at his reflection.

“You’re just freaking out,” his reflection says. “You’re having an anxiety attack, or something. But think about it. What’s an old man going to do? He’s  _ ancient _ . He’s a tiny, weak, gross old man.”

“What’s happening?” Joseph says weakly.

The reflection moves out of the mirror. 

Joseph falls backwards, slamming into the door in shock as the reflection walks out of the mirror and comes to stand in the tiny men’s room with him. The reflection is not of him, Joseph can see that now. The dark hair, the black eyes, the maybe ten years age difference, the large scar on his cheek. The reflection is a little taller, has a stronger, more athletic build, and a sharper, longer face, though the similarity is still remarkable. He is wearing a yellow T-shirt and a dark hoodie, the front of his jacket shiny with dark blood that Joseph can’t bring himself to look directly at.

The reflection scrutinises Joseph’s face, a smile slowly growing.

“Christ, Joey, you look just like me,” he says.

“ _ Dad _ ?” Joseph says, as if it could possibly be anyone else.

“Yeah,” the ghost of Eddie Kaspbrak says. “Has it been twenty-seven years already?”

“Yeah. You’re dead.”

“Oh, I know. Fucked up, right? I’m dead and I  _ still  _ gotta deal with this fucking clown.” He jams his thumb towards the door, where Keene has gone eerily quiet and still. 

Before Joseph can say anything, Eddie kicks the door open and bursts out into the hall. Keene is backing away from them, sliding back up towards the office, laughing so hard that the edges of his mouth are cracking and splitting at the seams, showing something red and vivid underneath. He is still laughing as he backs away, a sound that feels less like a human expression of joy and more like the way a chimp baring its teeth might be mistaken for a smile. 

“Run, you piece of shit clown!” Eddie hollers after it. “We’re coming for you again, you watch your fucking back!”

“Didn’t get so lucky last time, little Eddie,” the thing that looks like an old man says as it crawls back into the darkness. “Won’t be so lucky this time, either. Lot can happen even after you’re dead.”

“Suck my nuts,” Eddie says, flipping it off.

He turns back to Joseph and gives a quick nod.

“Where are the others?” He says. “We better get to work. There’s a lot of catching up to do.”


	4. Lucky Number Seven

Joseph and Dan storm out of the house, which leaves Will, George, Rose and Zara sitting around Will’s kitchen table. George can’t stop grinning. It’s just that the whole thing is so incredibly funny. He can’t stop looking at Will’s big school project on The History of Derry; it’s bursting with photographs, news stories, handwritten accounts, crime reports and statistics. It’s probably the most comprehensive overview of the history of any town anyone’s ever put together, and it is _insane_. Derry is soaked in more blood and crime than the sleaziest crime novel, and George can’t stop looking at it. Rose and Zara lean in as well, consuming the information as much as they can over his shoulder. He doesn’t know what they think, but George loves it. Doesn’t believe a goddamn word of it, but he loves it. It’s like the kind of thing a conspiracy theorist would come up with from a bunker ten miles underground. 

Will believes it, though. She really, _really_ believes it. George can see it in her eyes, in the intent focus of her stare as they flip through the book. He stops eventually, lets Rose slide it over the table towards her and Zara because he’s more interested in Will, in the way she’s so tuned into everything that’s happening around her, the amount that this means to her. This _matters_ to her so much, that they buy her little theory. 

“Say we buy all this,” George says, “and it’s _so_ compelling. What then?”

“Then we go and we kill It,” Will says.

“What about the guys that left? We can do it without them?”

“They’ll be back as soon as they see It. It’s not going to let them just slip away,” she says. “Twice our parents got together and killed It. You think It’s not petty enough to do anything to try and get some revenge? To try and hurt our parents just a little bit more?”

“I don’t know, it’s your story.”

Her eyes flash dangerously.

“It’s not a _story_ ,” she says. “My dad ruined his whole life putting everything into this so _your_ parents could live comfortably and safely outside.”

“The fuck are you angry at me for?” George says. “I could never get my old man to do fucking anything for me, don’t act like it’s my fault he dropped your dad in the shit. He did the same thing to me.”

“I’m sorry, I understand it must be hard being the son of one of the most famous horror authors of the 21st century and an award-winning actress,” Will says. “You clearly had so little opportunity to do anything with your life.”

Rose pointedly doesn’t look, but Zara stifles a snort of laughter. George keeps smiling and doesn’t bite back. He's used to it.

"If our fathers named us after one another, they must have been really important to each other," George says instead.

"My grandfather was called Will," Will snaps. 

"So, you're named after two people. Why are you so mad at me?"

"You're treating this all like a joke. This was my father's life's work."

"What do you _expect?_ This is fucking _nuts_. Magic immortal serial killers? Generational curses? This fucking clown?"

George points to the photograph of a clown standing amongst what looks like a group of 1900s gangsters. Outrageously, there was another photo of a clown, standing in the middle of a street behind some young boys, just staring right at the camera like he thought it was a big joke. Will, Rose and Zara all stared at the photos in confused horror, Zara frowning hard, eyes round and huge in her face. George realises instantly that he's missed a joke; he looks back at the book with a preemptive sneer on his face, ready to dismiss whatever was freaking the others out.

The photographs are ancient; the one of the boys on the sidewalk must be a hundred years old. It's not even in colour, the boys frozen on the street in a myriad of greys, the grain of the camera too deep to pick out the exact details of their faces. Who they are is lost to time; all they're going to be now is two schoolboys standing in the middle of the street, in the shadow of a clown.

The clown is oddly clear and bright against the backdrop; George finds that his eye is drawn to it, as if the entire photograph is composed to make it the centre. It's _too_ vivid, somehow he can see every inch of the clown's skin, the way the caked-on makeup is cracked, the vast, rolling eyes, the drool hanging from one scarlet lip…

Scarlet?

The clown, slowly, turns its head towards them. 

Zara is rigid in her seat, paralysed. Rose jumps up out of her chair, feet skidding on the tile floor. Will doesn't move at all, just sits there, her face becoming a mask of contempt. The clown smiles.

"I told your Mommy once that she couldn't save them all," the clown says, its bulbous eyes fixing on Rose. "And she didn't. She didn't save Stanley… Or Eddie… She didn't stop your Daddy from driving Hi Ho Silver right off a cliff, did he Georgie? She didn't stop yours from drinking himself to death, right, Zara?"

"What the fuck is going on?" Zara says. 

"They used to call themselves the Losers Club," the clown says. It keeps _moving_ , the other people in the photo motionless as It moves past them, as if they were just decorations placed for It to use as It wished, clambering closer and closer to the camera. "Just a bunch of losers… Not much of a club, Will, leaving one of you behind. They all abandoned him, and then he abandoned you. Don't you wish you could see the sky, Will?"

There is labour in the way It talks, the words exhausting It as It draws ever closer to the frame, gloved hands creeping around the edges of the photograph. It is close enough now that George can see the wet looseness of Its eyes, reflecting something that was not there, glimmering with some sickly inner light. 

“I knew a Georgie Denbrough once upon a time. Sweet little Georgie Denbrough. Went out to play and never came home. Did Daddy ever tell you about how he let Georgie die?” The clown’s eyes are shining with joy that makes bile rise in George’s throat. “He let his precious baby brother go out one day and die, and now he’s doing the same to you. No Big Bill to protect you now! Or maybe… You’re glad he’s dead?”

“Fuck you,” George spits.

The clown laughs with delight, shaking the edges of the photograph, contorting it as It begins to struggle out of the frame. George leaps back in fear, tripping over the legs of his chair in desperation to get away, the chair clattering to the ground loudly. A hand begins to emerge from the photograph.

“What the fuck is it doing? How is it doing that?!” Rose screams.

“What is It saying? Will? Will, what’s going on?” Zara says. 

“First it was your parents, now it’s you. Then it’ll be your children, and then their children. I’ll eat and I’ll eat and I’ll eat. None of you will ever get the teeth marks out.” Its arm was stretching out, reaching across the table, claws digging into the wooden tabletop. “I was in you before you even knew I existed, I was part of you before you were born! I’m the puppet master of your existence, and you think you can kill me? _You think you can kill me_?”

Its head is starting to rise up through the photograph, face breaching through the film of the picture like someone tearing through plastic, Its hideous, distorted face pulled into a rictus grin full of an impossible number of teeth as it tears through the limits of the picture. Rose is screaming, Zara is shouting, George can hear himself screaming before he knows the sound is coming from him, an animal sound that he didn’t even know he was capable of making. 

Will is quiet.

“I’m not scared of you,” she says. She slams the book shut.

The book erupts with blood. It streams out of the pages, gallons of thick, dark blood, flooding over the ground and spilling crimson over Will’s clean floor. George tries to escape it but it’s on his shoes and it’s _burning_ , it’s eating through the leather of his shoes like lava, fucking cartoon lava, the kind of shit you’d see in a kid’s film, and he’s screeching at the sight of his clothes bursting into flames right before Zara throws a bucket of dishwater over him.

The front door bursts open and Dan Uris runs inside panting like his heart is about to burst, wild-eyed.

“Something really fucked up just happened to me,” he says, and then he sees the blood, and the water over George, and the burning book, and he can only stare with his mouth open as Joseph Fosse runs in too, followed by another man that George doesn’t know. 

“Guys,” Joseph says. “Guys.”

“What?” Zara says, sounding exasperated already.

The man with Joseph could be his older brother, but George understands instantly that it isn’t. By the look on Will’s face, she knows too.

“This is my dad,” Joseph says.

“Hi,” says the ghost of Edward Kaspbrak. “Oh, you guys are a mess.”

Edward Kaspbrak is about forty years old, which makes him only a couple of years older than Zara. He is startled to see her, stopping dead -- her father’s voice in her head says _pun intended?_ with that wicked grin he always got when he thought something was particularly funny -- in front of her, hand on his mouth. Eventually he reaches for her, but there’s no touch. He just drifts through her, a cold feeling, like the burn on your skin of an aerosol can. 

“Fuck,” he says. “The pictures I saw of you, you were ten. Now you’re _my_ age.”

“It’s what happens over twenty-seven years,” Zara says. 

“It’s so crazy… And you’re Dan? And George? And you’re… Fuck, are you Ben and Bev’s kid?”

“Yes,” Rose says, blinking feverishly fast. “I’m Rose.”

“And I’m Will,” Will says. “I’m Mike’s daughter.”

Then Eddie says the worst thing he could have possibly said.

“Where’s everyone else?”

The silence in the room gives him the answer before any of them speak. It’s odd to watch a ghost grieve. He was already only half corporeal, like a faded photograph, and he grows dimmer when the loss hits him, the colours flickering out like someone is turning down the lights. When Zara looks close, she can see an odd shimmering aura around him, like a shell.

“Beverly knew. Fuck, she always knew,” he says, softly. His voice has a faint natural echo, like a bad connection. “She said none of us would make it another twenty-seven years, but I didn’t think… I thought because we stopped It, things would be ok.”

He rubs the huge scar on his cheek, staring absently at Zara’s face. There is a pain in his eyes that she recognises instantly; she has seen it in her father’s, and her own. He is looking for her father in her, she thinks, the things she and Richie Tozier share. The same eyes, the same cheekbones, the same expressive mouth. He sees those things in her, and it hurts him.

“What happened to them all?” He says, suddenly. He looks at Dan when he says it, and the implication becomes obvious. 

“You already know,” Dan says.

“He had a kind of early on-set dementia,” George says, uncomfortable with sincerity. 

“Dad had a heart attack,” Rose says. “Mom had cancer.”

“Old age,” is all Will can offer. “Too young, really, but the stress…”

Zara finds it hard to say, but her silence makes Eddie’s face crumple, mouth pulled tight with grief. He turns away from her, biting his lip as he tries to hold it together.

“I need… I need a minute. I’m sorry,” he says. 

He vanishes like someone shutting off a projector, startling everyone as the light seems to shift around them to account for the visual absence. Out of the window facing the backyard, Zara sees him reappear outside, pacing across the yard as though he was always there. She glances at Joseph, who is looking a little like he is considering throwing up.

“Do you have like… A towel?” George asks Will.

“Yeah, I’ll give you a hand,” Will says, leading George towards the stairs in the hallway.

“I’m sorry,” Zara tells him.

“It’s better than being on fire,” George says as he vanishes upstairs.

“I think I should check on my dad…” Joseph says, sounding shell-shocked.

“I’ll come with,” Zara says. She is surprised when Joseph looks relieved rather than annoyed. Weird little man. He looks at everything around him like he’s scared it’s going to leap up and bite his face off. 

Actually in Derry, that’s probably a valid concern.

Outside, Eddie is walking back and forth. He glances at Joseph and Zara when they walk out onto the back porch and stops halfway through a row of neatly planted sunflowers, some of them drooping through his body like strange adornments. He looks _so_ much like Joseph. Zara sits down on the edge of the porch, Joseph sitting on the steps a little away from her, staring at the ground like he’s too scared to look at his own dad. 

“Were you and my dad close?” Zara says.

“He was the best friend I ever had,” Eddie says. “All the Losers were the best friends I had but Richie was… I think Richie was the love of my life.”

Joseph makes a noise like someone unexpectedly hit him with a water balloon.

“What do you mean?” He says.

“Is… Fuck, is Myra still around?” Eddie said.

“Yeah. She… She’s fine. She got remarried.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“She hates you. She used to tell me you were a bad person. I didn’t really know you, so I couldn’t really argue with her? But, uh, I’m not really… That sure?” Joseph says. “That everything she said was untrue?”

“Probably not,” Eddie says. “I wasn’t a very good husband. Partly because we were really bad for each other, but also I was gay.”

“Jesus Christ,” Joseph says.

“So, you were in love with my dad?” Zara says, calmly.

“Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I was. Actually, I’m not sorry about it. He was the best. I loved him, and he was the best.”

“This explains a lot,” she says. “And he _was_ the best.”

Eddie smiles sympathetically. Zara always loved her father. He was often annoying and frustrating, but she loved him.

“Did he ever… Did he ever find anyone?” Eddie says.

“There were a few guys in his life,” Zara says. “Some of them were nicer than others. He really had a thing for guys who were like, really smart and really intense, so some of those ended up being assholes. He never really settled down, though. He used to say I was his better half.”

“Yeah, he told me the same thing, last time I saw him,” Eddie says. 

Richie had a few guys; Zara would watch them drift in and out of his life. There was one man, a Brian, who was smart as hell and spoke like a whip cracking, both fast and deadly. He had been around the longest, a few years, a remarkable achievement by Richie Tozier standards. He’d come to the funeral, had told Zara that he loved Richie, and Richie had loved him, but that he thought he had never known Richie. Wished he could have known him better. And Zara had agreed, because she had spent her whole life wishing the same. 

Eddie is still flickering in and out, like the projection of him is faltering. He wipes his eyes but when his hands pull back, they’re dry. He looks oddly disappointed by this.

“I loved them all so much,” Eddie says. “I really wanted to see them again. I know dying means you kind of don’t get to do that, but fuck. Fuck, I just wanted to tell them I loved them.”

Joseph’s thin mouth and vast eyes are both trembling, the threat of tears building on the edges. Eddie notices him and his face goes through a journey too fast for Zara to follow. She needs to leave these two to work some stuff out, she decides.

“You guys really need to talk,” she says, standing up and brushing a little garden dirt off the back of her slacks. 

Back in the house it sounds like George and Will are having an argument upstairs, raised voices shaking through the ceiling, but Rose and Dan are talking in the living room, having made themselves comfortable on the small loveseat. They are talking, a little absurdly, about Rose’s volunteering with the DSA and Dan’s work as a union rep. The fact they are talking about this when a book just exploded into a fountain of blood in front of them and the ghost of a man who has been dead for thirty years is in the yard is almost comical. Dan looks up when Zara walks inside and gives a ‘can you believe this shit’ smile. 

“What are we going to do?” She says.

“What do you mean?” Rose says.

“We need to come up with an actual plan,” Zara says. “Stay there. I’m getting my tablet.”

George smokes an eCig continually as Will finds a clean towel and directs him to the bathroom. It smells like wood smoke. He has no issues, apparently, with whipping off his shirt and pants in front of her, towelling himself dry roughly as he stands in baggy boxer shorts. She leans on the doorway to the bathroom as he dries off his hair.

“You gonna watch me shower, next?” He says.

“There isn’t enough money in the world, rich boy,” she says. 

“So, what’s your fucking deal?” He says, draping the towel over his shoulder. “Are you like, bitter as fuck because your old man left you to deal with all this insane crap? Did the clown kill your mom?”

“My mom lives in Bar Harbor. I’m here because I want to be. Dad never made me do anything. I wanted to do this,” Will says. 

“Why the fuck? You could be doing anything. You could be out there, riding the highways, picking up hot people, bringing shame to your family name.”

“That what you do?”

“Yeah.” George squints at himself in the mirror above the sink and shakes his head hard, shaggy hair flying out everywhere. 

“Well, that’s as good an argument as any against it,” Will says.

George has the same knife-sharp asshole smile whenever he gets insulted, one side of his mouth pulled up high and tight to show his canine. It’s wolf-like. Will doesn’t like him; he never has an insult of his own, and she feels like he’s taking careful stock of every strike against him, tallying up all the little cuts for later. He makes her edgy. She prefers Zara’s straightforwardness and Rose’s earnest interest, she thinks. Even Dan’s anger feels honest. George comes across like he has an ulterior motive.

“You know my dad,” he says.

“I know of him. Everyone does.”

“Yeah, exactly. Hard to believe he was like, a hero once. Though your dad was the real hero, I guess. Sacrificing himself and all that. Mine was just, what?”

“My dad’s best friend. He loved him.”

“Maybe Dad should have shacked up with Mike then, instead of tormenting Mom for thirty years. Too bad he went crazy and got himself killed before the divorce went through.”

“I’m not your therapist.”

“This whole shit is about your darkest secrets coming out, baby, better get used to hearing about my fucking daddy issues. Don’t pretend you don’t have them too. Your dad is your hero so you’re scared of failing him, I’m guessing? Don’t want to let him down?”

“Is this your clown audition tape?”

“Why the fuck is it a _clown_?”

“I don’t know. Dad thought because kids used to trust clowns.”

“ _When?_ A hundred years ago?”

George wrings water out of his shirt. Will hands him a pair of her dad’s old khakis and one of his old button-ups, but both are way too big and George looks ridiculous rolling up the cuffs of the pants. It doesn’t bother him at all, though. He is not someone who seems to particularly care about his appearance. 

“I don’t know,” Will says.

“You know anything?”

“I know this thing kills kids, and stopping it is more important than writing books based on video games.”

That actually strikes a nerve. George looks at her over his shoulder, takes the eCig and turns it off, jamming it into the pocket of her dad’s shirt. He sighs sharply through his nose.

“I came all the fuckin’ way out here,” he says, “to help you. I didn’t have to do that. Sorry about your fucking dad, but it’s not my goddamn fault he died, or that my dad was a useless fucking asshole. He’s always been a useless asshole. Don’t take out his decisions on me.”

“I’m not. You’ve been weird and rude since you got here. What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know? Rise above it? Take the high road?”

“How about you do that.”

“I’m doing _you_ a favour. The least you could do is thank me.”

“You won’t even sit down and listen to what I have to say!”

George growls with frustration and storms off back down the stairs, Will tailing after him with a heavy sigh on her lips, and nearly crashes into Zara, who’s coming into the house with an overnight bag in her hands. 

“You wanna go get a drink?” He says.

“Absolutely not,” Zara says.

“Fuck it,” he turns around and sees Joseph walking inside with his shoulders hunched. “You. Come get a drink with me. Don’t bring your ghost dad.”

“Uh,” Joseph says. “O-ok.”

“I think it’s more important that we stay here and talk about what’s happening,” Rose says, leaning over the back of the sofa. Dan, next to her, nods in agreement.

“Fuck you,” George says, grabbing Joseph by the front of the shirt and tugging him outside into the front yard, whether Joseph liked it or not. 

The door slams shut behind them and the four of them look around each other in irritated silence, except for Zara, who pulls a tablet out of her bag and begins typing quickly on the screen. Eddie reappears in the middle of the living room, startling Rose so badly she drops her glass of iced tea.

“Bill’s kid is kind of an asshole, huh?” Eddie says.

“Forget him. They’ll be back,” Will says.

“We need to know what you know,” Zara says. “About the fucking clown.”

Zara walks back into the house and leaves Joseph and Eddie on the porch. Joseph doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say and clearly Eddie doesn’t either. Eddie sits by him, making no mark on the dust and leaving no footsteps in the grass. It’s like he only makes a mark when he intends to, and doesn’t think about things like that. He casts no shadow either. 

“I used to dream one day you’d come home and you’d save me from school,” Joseph says. “And you’d be so cool. You’d have been on some big adventure. And I’d get to be cool too.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “I wish I could have.”

“Did you love me?” Joseph said. “Like, did you love either of us?”

“I… Cared about Myra. And I thought that was love. But it wasn’t. I just couldn’t let myself believe that the love I had for Richie was the real thing. Didn’t want to believe it,” Eddie said. “But I loved you. I still do. I always will.”

“But you left.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I made a promise, a long time before you were born. When I was less than half your age.”

“Kids make promises all the time, they don’t mean anything.”

“This meant everything. If I hadn’t come… I don’t know if any of them would have lived. I died for them.”

“But you couldn’t live for me?”

Eddie looks away. Joseph can feel himself crying ugly, fat tears that he’s immediately ashamed of, for their childishness and their weakness. He wishes he could be more resilient, but the shameful truth is that he is not strong, and never has been.

“I didn’t want to die,” Eddie says. “I wanted to live. I wanted… A beautiful penthouse apartment, on the coast, with a beach I could take you to, so you could run and play every day. You used to love the beach so much.”

“Mom says the beach is dirty.”

“Yeah, she would.” Eddie rubs his face with his hands. “That’s what I would have done, if I’d lived. Divorced Myra, taken you, gotten a place with Richie. It’s so fucking… It’s so unfair.”

Joseph understands that Eddie is grieving, too. He thought his friends were alive. That he’d have a chance to see them one last time. Maybe tell Richie what he feels. But they’re dead and Joseph feels like a poor replacement, a man that Eddie barely knows, neither the child nor the friends he loved and longs for. 

“It is unfair. I lost you. To a fu-- A clown,” Joseph says. 

“Do you not swear?”

“Mom says it’s uncouth.”

“You’re  _ thirty-two _ .” Eddie puts his face in his hands. “I knew this would happen. I married my mother and she raised you just like how I got raised. I couldn’t protect you.”

Joseph can’t believe what he’s hearing. He finds he’s kind of  _ offended _ . He knows his mother can be overprotective and sometimes a little controlling, but she’s caring. She only does it because she loves him, and probably because she’s so traumatised about her husband vanishing into the night like a spectre with no warning. He stands up very quickly, holding his chin high as he tries to do the one thing he has never done in his life; argue with his dad.

“Maybe Mom is too much,” he says. “But she was there. And she would never abandon me. Not like you did.”

He can’t believe he managed to say it. Eddie looks so crestfallen that Joseph almost wants to take it all back right away, but he doesn’t. He runs back into the house. 


	5. Seeing is Believing

Zara is hard at work. Rose is trying to clean tea off the carpet. Eddie helps a little by picking up most of the broken glass, but his ghostly fingers are inelegant and most of the smaller pieces escape him; he can only pick up larger things and only then do grand, sweeping gestures, as if fine motor control is something that abandons you when your life does. He is visibly frustrated by this so Rose tells him it’s fine, she’ll sort it out, don’t worry about it. It feels insane to be having this conversation with a dead man. Her words don’t bring him a lot of comfort, but she thinks angry ghosts are a bad idea. 

He makes her anxious. This whole situation makes her anxious, but the fucking  _ ghost _ doesn’t help. She hides in the kitchen for a few moments after dumping the glass in the trash and just breathes. She texts her girlfriend again. Haneul thinks this whole thing is insane and Rose suspects she’s right, but Rose also couldn’t turn down either an opportunity to help, or to learn more about her parents. 

She never expected to know everything about her parents -- you never know everything about  _ anyone _ \-- but the way things are now, she’s having trouble keeping straight in her mind what is and isn’t reality. The clowns and monsters and ghosts aren’t helping. Fuck, she doesn’t want to go completely crazy. She loves her parents, but in that moment she resents how little they let her in on everything. They were such intensely private people, especially her mother, who held onto her secrets like a dragon hoarding jewels and had the worst night terrors Rose had ever seen during the end of her life. They’d started a little while after her father had died; the times Rose stayed home she would be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of her mother screaming, wrenching wails for people that weren’t there and that vanished from memory by the morning. The chemo, the short while they’d tried it, before they realised it wasn’t going to do any good, had made them so much worse. Beverly Hanscom-Marsh, only sixty-five and still so brave and intelligent and proud, who held onto her secrets in the day with all the strength she had, but couldn’t hide the pain they caused in her dreams. 

Rose wipes the tears from her eyes and rejoins the others in the living room. Zara’s tablet is projecting a mindmap onto the wall that she is rearranging and adding to with a pen. In the centre is written IT. Around it spreads a web of ideas; RITUAL. SPACE. FEEDS ON FEAR. EVERY 27 YEARS. MAKE IT SMALL. WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS REAL. That last one makes Rose’s stomach lurch with fear.

“Yeah, I don’t really know how to explain it,” Eddie is saying. “It’s like… The power of communal belief or something. It didn’t matter what was  _ true _ or not, it’s what you believe. Everyone believed we could kill the clown, so we did, for a while. Or they did, I guess.”

“Why didn’t it stick?” Dan says.

“It’s weaker,” Will says. “It’s more afraid. My dad always said it was scared now. It’s been  _ over _ twenty-seven years, almost twenty-eight, but it waited for him to die before it came back.”

“Knew it didn’t stand a chance with Mike Hanlon around,” Eddie says ruefully. Will smiles, a little. Her love for her father drives her so completely, Rose observes. It must be nice, to be so secure in knowing who your parents were. 

“You have to make it small,” Eddie says. “You make it weaker than you.”

“How exactly are we supposed to do that?” Dan says.

“Believe it is,” Eddie says.

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

“You think I don’t know that? I used to write reports about sound financial investment opportunities, and now I’m a ghost in my dead friend’s house, talking about how to kill a clown for the  _ third _ time.”

Dan sighs and runs a hand through his hair. 

“How did the ritual work?” Zara says.

“It didn’t, really. We sacrificed tokens that represented our past, and chanted words, but it just… Didn’t work. I don’t know why. Maybe because we didn’t believe in it enough.” 

“How are we just meant to  _ believe _ it’ll work?” Rose says, the first thing she’s said in a while. “How are you meant to invest all of yourself in something like that and be sure it’ll work?”

“It’s different when you’re down there,” Eddie says. “You believe differently when you’re afraid.”

Rose doesn’t like that either. She doesn’t like all this emphasis on what they  _ believe _ . She doesn’t know  _ what  _ she believes, and having to rely on her faith feels like standing on deeply shaky grounds. It is her instinct to analyse everything, to dig into the history of it and know how it was formed, and why. There’s no  _ reason _ here, only nightmare logic. It’s like bad abstract art. 

She stands at the edge of the room, feeling out of place here. Zara and Will seem so ready to believe whatever the ghost says, and are totally bought in. Dan is more resistant, but he’s still there, still engaged and present. The idea of killing some mystery monster… She knows it’s real, but she doesn’t want to kill anything, or do any  _ rituals _ . She can’t imagine either of her parents killing anything; her mother was always so petite, a raging flame inside a bone china dish, contained by eggshell thin walls she built for herself. Her father was a big man, but he was so  _ gentle _ , a delicate touch he deployed with the care of an architect who knew how the wrong kind of support could destroy a building.

They had been scared for as long as Rose could remember. Of what, she never knew exactly, though she had her theories.  _ That  _ man. The one whose name they didn’t speak. Rose never had the full story, only knew there had been a man, and her mother had run, an act of bravery that Rose couldn’t fathom the scale of, and her father had been there for her mother to run  _ to _ , a safe home plate. There had been more, and she had always hoped to hear it, but was resigned to the fact she never would.

“We’ve seen this thing,” Rose says, “a little. But how can we believe in it when we don’t know what it really is… What it does?”

Dan points at her suddenly, startling her a little. She likes him a lot, she thinks. She kind of likes all of them, but Dan sat her down and asked her about herself, and that was nice. She thinks he might be kind. 

“That’s exactly it,” Dan says to Eddie. “You, our parents, Will, you all grew up here. You’re connected with this place, what it does. Most of the rest of us haven’t even seen what it does. You said you guys had to connect with your memories, right? If you hadn’t done that, then you wouldn’t have found out how to kill it in yourself. We need to investigate.”

“Nancy Drew has a good point,” Will says. Dan makes a surprised laugh. “Even I only know about this thing through my dad’s stories. You believe what you see, right?”

“Where do we go?” Rose says.

“I have some ideas,” Eddie says. “But we’re not fucking splitting up this time.”

The bar George takes Joseph to is a dump. It’s old as hell and there’s no one there except a few old drunks, probably because it’s barely gone five, but George is used to drinking with no one except the miserable old locals, who won’t ask questions. He gets them both a beer while Joseph lays a few napkins down over the chair he sits at. He stares nervously at the bottle of beer that George puts in front of him.

“I haven’t spiked it,” George says.

“I don’t really drink,” Joseph says. “Mom and Greg never drank so I didn’t really… Grow up with it.” He keeps plucking at the buttons at the front of his shirt, hand doing the same twitching motion over and over.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Christ. That’s depressing. You’re only three years younger than me. You look better than I do.”

Joseph is thrown by this, blushing as if it’s some high compliment and not George talking about the bags around his own eyes and the broken capillaries in his nose. George is aging too fast; the greying hair he got from his dad, everything else is his own fault. 

_ Just like life _ , he thinks, and then scolds himself for being so fucking melodramatic. He takes a long drink.

“How’s it going with your dead dad?” George says.

“Oh. I don’t know,” Joseph says. 

“What did you guys  _ talk _ about?”

“Uh. Why he abandoned me? And, uh, how I wished he was my hero?”

“Are you telling me, or asking me?”

“Tell-telling you?”

George laughs, shaking his head. He encourages Joseph to drink, waving a hand at the beer, which Joseph nervously reaches for. Joseph drinks like he’s not sure this isn’t going to be a prank. George is convinced this guy got invited out to prom as a joke more than once in his life. He just screams the type that gets picked on because it’s so easy it’s almost more effort  _ not  _ to. You know, the kind of kid that George picked on in high school. 

“What’s like, your deal?” George says.

“I don’t have one. I’m just a guy,” Joseph says. “I work in data processing.”

“Fuck me, that is boring. You like that?”

“Not really. But it pays well.”

“And you spend that money on…?”

“Uh. I don’t know. I like plants? And, uh, video games?”

“Jesus Christ, stop  _ asking  _ me things that aren’t questions. Tell me.”

“What’s  _ your _ deal?”

“Dad was one of the most premiere horror writers of the 21st century, and Mom has been nominated for two Oscars,” George says. “I write books based on video games.”

“So you…”

Joseph stops and takes a drink of beer. George can feel the question burning behind his eyes, even if he hasn’t said it yet. 

“Yes, I am a fucking loser,” George says.

“No, I wasn’t going to say that,” Joseph says. “I was going to ask what video games.”

George stares. Joseph has eyes like a baby deer and there is not a shred of anything malicious in them. It’s fucking annoying. George could rip him apart like a mountain lion if he wanted to. Good for Joseph that he’s trying to be a good person now. Or a better one, at least. 

“Mostly the  _ Omens _ series. Wrote something for  _ World of Warcraft 2 _ , but I don’t like high fantasy much, and there’s too much lore. The fans get mad at you. Both the  _ January Jones _ books. Did the  _ Dishonored _ reboot, the one everyone hated.”

“The rail shooter?”

“Yeah. Stupid fucking idea, but Bethesda were going bankrupt so I guess they were desperate…” He shakes his head. “Why the fuck are we talking about this? We have to kill a clown.”

Joseph goes even paler than he normally is. He drinks more.

“I don’t want to do this,” he says. 

“Forgive me if I’m wrong, chief, but has anyone in your life ever given a fuck about what you want?”

Joseph blinks. He looks like he might cry, and stares at George in speechless horror, lower lip trembling theatrically. 

“Jesus Christ. It was a question, not an assault. Drink your beer.”

George gets another round, and another one. Joseph starts to go pretty spectacularly pink. He wasn’t lying about not drinking; he is clearly feeling the effects already. It would take a hell of a lot more to get George drunk, but he’s not really interested in that anymore. He’s just enjoying seeing Joseph struggle through his first experience of alcohol.

“She said my dad was a hero,” Joseph says. His voice has taken on a mournful edge.

“Yeah, said that about mine too,” George says.

“You hate your dad.”

“We had our issues.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t good enough for him. I was never what he wanted me to be, and I knew it. He pretended, but me and Mom weren’t ever what he wanted. Fuck, maybe he was secretly in love with Mike all along. Maybe he was pining for that his whole life.”

“My dad was secretly in love with Zara’s dad.” Joseph finishes the third beer and wipes his bleary eyes.

“What?” George barks with laughter. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yeah. Zara seemed happy about it. That her dad loved anyone. I think she loved her dad a lot.”

“Nice for her.”

“Yeah. Nice for her.”

“Sucks your dad had to marry a lady, and whatever the fuck.”

“Yeah. I guess people did that back then. I wonder why he never came out.”

“Ask him. I’m never gonna be able to ask why my dad treated me like a bad photocopy. You should be talking to him, not me.”

“Don’t guilt me.”

It’s a snap that George wasn’t expecting, and it makes his lips curl up into a wicked little smile. Joseph turns scarlet and looks away, suddenly all demure. The fact there’s an edge in him that he’s  _ hiding _ is immediately attractive, the way an invitation-only event has a particular allure to it. George wants to see what he can do to make it happen again.

“So, what’s the deal with Mommy, then?” George says.

“What do you mean?” Joseph is guarded now, looking for the weapon in the extended hand.

“She doesn’t like you drinking… You keep mentioning her, actually. Do you have a huge hard-on for her, or…?”

“Why are you being disgusting?”

“I’m very good at it. Oh, wait, I see. You have too much Mommy and not enough  _ Daddy _ .”

George winks and Joseph turns beet-red.

“I’m fucking with you,” he says.

“Well, I don’t think that’s nice. Or funny.”

“C’mon, Joey, don’t be a fucking wet blanket. We’re having fun before we get eaten alive by a murder clown. You chose to hang out with me and not with your actual father, who you haven’t seen in--”

“Stop guilt-tripping me!” Joseph slams a fist on the tabletop and it makes George actually jump, which delights him, grinning at Joseph open-mouthed. “And my name isn’t  _ Joey _ . It’s  _ Joseph _ .”

He gets up very quickly and storms out, looking so fiercely embarrassed it’s a small miracle that he doesn’t burst into flames. George scrambles out of the chair and dashes after him, after waving his phone in the general direction of the card reader, not stopping to check if the transaction actually went through. Joseph is stalking down the sidewalk a little uneasily, and George catches up with him easily.

“ _ Don’t walk away, baby, don’t go _ ,” George sings to him. Joseph glares at him over his shoulder. 

“You’re an asshole,” Joseph says. “I don’t have to listen to you. I don’t even know you.”

“Damn right! You don’t have to listen to anyone except yourself. You ever done that before? Just done whatever you wanted?”

Joseph walks faster, but slips on the road and George grabs him by the back of the shirt easily. He pulls himself out of George’s grip and stares at him for a second, standing in the middle of the crosswalk with his shirt half untucked and his face all vinegar and spite. He’s so fun. He’s so easy to make mad, it’s like a big red button that’s screaming  _ PUSH ME _ . What the fuck is George supposed to do? Have self control? Fuck that. 

“What do you want to do?”George teases again.

“To punch you. To go home. To go back to Will’s,” Joseph says.

“You can do all of those,” George says.

He wonders if Joseph will actually punch him. It wouldn’t hurt much, and besides, George has been punched an  _ awful _ lot of times, he’s pretty sure he could take it. But Joseph just turns away again and keeps walking back to Will’s house.

The plan gets passed around amongst the group. George thinks it’s stupid, but Joseph goes with it. They decide to go the next morning, after they’ve had time to rest. Will’s house is not made to house six people but they make do, because Eddie strongly warns against going to the Derry Townhouse and they’re all a little spooked about what will happen if they go out on their own. The six of them make do; Zara and Rose take the double bed in Mike Hanlon’s room, because they’re adults, Will keeps her bed, Joseph gets the couch. Dan and George make do with the living room floor. Both of them make nearly identical comments about sharing the couch if ‘cuddling is ok’ and then stare at each other with mutual horror that the other would think of the same joke, which makes Joseph laugh for the first time all day.

They leave Eddie to his own devices. He says that he wants to see how much of the town he can explore and vanishes. Joseph pretends to not look upset. 

The morning is a disaster, with six people trying to operate a small bathroom, shouting about hot water. Will makes them all coffee and says if they want food they can go sort themselves out, she’s not a soup kitchen, and she’s seen how much money they all make. George says she sounds bitterer than her coffee and Will says the sugar costs extra, which makes Zara laugh.

It’s Zara who Will takes to the places Eddie suggested. Will knows Derry better than residents twice her age, has memorised every inch of it and the maps of the underground besides. She knows the history of different buildings, knows how many hands and names they’ve passed through, knows the secrets and lies that are built into the very structure of the town. She regales Zara with some of it as they drive over to the old library building, the one they shut down when Will was five after years of Mike campaigning for more funding. 

“This town is a nightmare,” is Zara’s conclusion. “I guessed that when I realised you were the only other black woman I’d seen since crossing city limits, but you’re not shaking my confirmation bias.”

“Yeah, crazy that it takes a long time for a place to move on from its history as a KKK hotbed. Wonder why more people aren’t attracted to it.”

The old library is not looking any better than it was twenty years ago. Will had only very faint childhood memories of it; her father was a voracious reader and obviously had worked at the library for decades, but he never liked the old building. Of course, he was honest about the truth. He had lived there, worked there, been assaulted there. Lied to his friends there. 

The amount of guilt he carried for people who forgot and stopped caring about him makes her steaming hot with rage, but every time she remembers George’s middle name it hurts. She knows Bill was someone Mike loved deeply; they were all people he loved deeply, but there had been something  _ special _ about Bill Denbrough, he always said. Something magnetic, a north you could not help but follow. She can’t believe George is Bill’s son. Over the years she had thought a lot about who the children of her father’s friends would be; she had seen Ben and Beverly’s daughter as someone smart, creative, capable of creating something from nothing. Bill’s son would be a leader, like his dad, ready with the words and the guidance. Richie’s daughter was funny but a guardian, someone who was always there when you needed them. Eddie’s son, a hero. Stan’s son, someone who would guide them.

Hard not to be disappointed. At least Zara is kind of what she had been hoping for, although Will hadn’t really calculated how her being a very practical lawyer in her late-thirties rather than a comedian with untreated ADHD would affect her personality makeup. But Will is more grateful to just have someone who’s willing to do the work.

Will parks on the sidewalk and her and Zara head around the side of the library, leaving the barred front door and checking the back. There is an emergency exit to the basement rusted shut at the back, down a little flight of steps. Will gets the crowbar from the back of her truck and she and Zara manage to pry it open, shaking loose about a decade’s worth of rust. 

“You do a lot of breaking and entering?” Zara says.

“Not if the police are asking,” Will says. “No. They’re my work tools.”

“What do you do?”

They push the door open and face the inside of the basement, which is black as pitch.

“I’m with the parks and recreation department. I do a lot of maintenance.”

“It’s so weird to be talking about normal things like all of this isn’t lunacy.”

“I guess I’m used to it.”

They walk down the stairs into the basement. Zara turns on her phone’s torch, lighting up the basement with the bright white beam. It is filthy inside; the ground is littered with debris, the building slowly decaying in the absence of maintenance, paint peeling off the walls, abandoned books decaying with mould, plaster cracking and coming away from the wall. It smells like rot and the air is both cold and damp; it clings to the bare skin of Will’s arms and she feels the hairs there standing on end. She shivers, rubbing her arm with her hand. 

There’s a shuffling sound behind her and a second later Zara is placing her coat around Will’s shoulders. Will looks at her; her face is sharply defined between light and dark in the limited torchlight, and she smiles at Will almost shyly.

“I’m fine,” she says, before Will asks if she won’t need the coat. 

The coat is about the right size and feels expensive, so Will takes it without asking too much. She ignores the heat rising in her own face when she slips it on.

They continue through the basement. It was evidently a storage area once; huge metal shelves have been left to rust here, some still mounted with books, some of them bare. The books are thick with mould and decay. 

“Tell me about your dad,” Will says as they walk towards the stairs out of the basement and up to the ground floor. Zara blinks, like she’s surprised to be asked.

“You ever watch any of his stuff?” Zara says.

“Yeah, his stuff in kids’ films especially. Dad used to read all of Denbrough’s books, watch all of your dad’s movies… He’d look up Beverly’s new fashion lines, any buildings Ben Hanscom built…” Will trails off. “He missed them.”

The ground floor was once open and grand, with tall steps up to the next floor and large windows. Now it is covered with tarpaulin and wood and smells like damp. There’s no furniture left, only rotting carpet and peeling paint on the walls. The vast, complicated webs of spiders hang from the railings on the stairs. All the shelves are gone and in the darkness the rooms fade into blackness too much for the eye to parse.

“He was… Your dad is like, your hero, right?” Zara says. Will nods. “My dad was more like my best friend. Which is good and bad.”

They wander around the vast space of the library entrance. Will wonders what it is exactly they are looking for. Eddie told them to come here, but she’s not sure why. She knows her dad better than Zara ever knew hers, but she doesn’t think there’s anything particular here to tire Zara’s father to it. They’re looking  _ for  _ something.

“Dad was closeted for a long, long time. He dated a lot of women, especially in his twenties, when he was really running from being gay. He and my mom dated for about a year when they were like, thirty. She got pregnant, but she didn’t tell dad for a while because they fell out pretty bad and she didn’t think… She thought he’d be a shit dad. Maybe she was right, he was a  _ mess _ when he was young. I didn’t meet him until I was eight, and by then I was kind of my own person. That was how he always treated me… Like a person.” Zara reflexively straightens her glasses. “Which was good, sometimes, because I could tell him anything. And bad sometimes, because sometimes you want a dad who’ll take care of you and not someone you have to co-parent. He had a lot of problems. It took me a long time to work it out, but he was… He was lonely. He missed something, his entire life, and I never knew what it was.”

Will spreads her arms wide.  _ This _ , the gesture says. 

“He must have loved them all so much,” Zara says, “for it to matter even when he didn’t remember them. To know how important they were that his body remembered the loss without his mind thinking of it.”

She looks around the empty library, with its echoing halls.

“He must have really loved them.”

“Dad loved them that much. I always wondered if I was ever going to feel that way about anyone,” Will says.

They walk towards the back of the library. There’s a large set of double doors going towards what would have once been the main room and Will starts trying to push them open. They make a noise like metal being torn in two as she pushes harder and the hinges protest at being moved after all this time. She shoves harder before the door suddenly gives way and lets her fall through, hitting the floor on the inside. Her phone rattles out of her hand and skids along the ground; she stands up to get it and hears the door slam shut behind her, Zara letting out a panicked shout of  _ Will? _ right before she’s plunged into darkness. 


End file.
